August 1998:Russia defaults on its debt and its stock market collapses. As the value of the ruble plummets, Russian millionaires scramble to get money out of their country and into New York City, where real estate provides a safe haven for overseas investors. [Added March 20, 2017]

October 1998: Demolition of a vacant office building near the United Nations headquarters is making way for Trump World Tower. Donald Trump begins selling units in the skyscraper, which is scheduled to open in 2001 and becomes a prominent depository of Russian money. By 2004, one-third of the units sold on the 76th through 83rd floors of Trump World Tower involve people or limited liability companies connected to Russia or neighboring states. Assisting Trump’s sales effort is Ukrainian immigrant Semyon “Sam” Kislin, who issues mortgages to buyers of multimillion-dollar Trump World Tower apartments. In the late 1970s, Kislin had co-owned an appliance store with Georgian immigrant Tamir Sapir, and they had sold 200 television sets to Donald Trump on credit. By the early 1990s, Kislin had become a wealthy commodities trader and campaign fundraiser for Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who in 1996 appoints him to the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Meanwhile, Sapir makes a fortune as a New York City real estate developer. [Added March 20, 2017]

Also in 2002: Efforts to sell Russians apartments in Trump World Tower, Trump’s West Side condominiums, and Trump’s building on Columbus Circle expand with presentations in Moscow involving Sotheby’s International Realty and a Russian realty firm. In addition to buying units in Trump World Tower, Russians and Russian-Americans flood into another Trump-backed project in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. In South Florida alone, members of the Russian elite invest more than $98 million in seven Trump-branded luxury towers. [Added March 20, 2017]

June 2005: Paul Manafort proposes that he undertake a consulting assignment for one of President Vladimir Putin’s billionaire oligarchs. Manafort suggests a strategy for influencing politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics to benefit Putin’s government. [Added March 27, 2017]

Oct. 15, 2007: In an interview with Larry King, Trump says: “Look at Putin — what he’s doing with Russia — I mean, you know, what’s going on over there. I mean this guy has done — whether you like him or don’t like him — he’s doing a great job.”

July 2008: As the Florida real estate market began to crash, Trump sells a Florida residence to a Russian oligarch for $95 million, believed to be the biggest single-family home sale in US history. The Russian oligarch never lived in the house and, since then, it has been demolished. Three years earlier, Trump had bought the home at auction for $41 million. [Added March 3, 2017]

September 2008:Donald Trump Jr. says: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets… we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

January 2010—January 2011: After leaving Bayrock, Sater becomes “senior adviser to Donald Trump,” according to his Trump Organization business card. He also has a Trump Organization email address and office. The phone number listed on the card had belonged previously to a lawyer in Trump’s general counsel’s office. [Added March 3, 2017]

April 8, 2013: Three Russians whom the FBI later accused of spying on the United States discuss efforts to recruit American businessman Carter Page. According to The Washington Post, “[T]he government’s application for the surveillance order targeting Page included a lengthy declaration that laid out investigators’ basis for believing that Page was an agent of the Russian government and knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow, officials said.” [Added April 17, 2017]

June 18, 2013: Trump announces that the 2013 Miss Universe beauty pageant, which he owns, will take place in Moscow. The next day, he tweets: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?” While preparing for the pageant, Trump says, “I have plans for the establishment of business in Russia. Now, I am in talks with several Russian companies to establish this skyscraper.”

Oct. 17, 2013:On The Late Show, David Letterman asks Trump, “Have you had any dealings with the Russians?” Trump answers, “Well I’ve done a lot of business with the Russians…” Letterman continues, “Vladmir Putin, have you ever met the guy?” Trump says, “He’s a tough guy. I met him once.”

Nov. 5, 2013: In a deposition, an attorney asks Trump about Felix Sater. “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump answers. When asked how many times he had ever spoken with Sater, Trump says, “Not many.” When asked about his July 2013 BBC interview during which he was questioned about Sater’s alleged connections to organized crime, Trump says he didn’t remember it. [Added March 3, 2017]

November 2013: At the Miss Universe pageant, Trump says: “I do have a relationship [with Putin] and I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today… I do have a relationship with him… He’s done a very brilliant job in terms of what he represents and who he’s represented.” While Trump is in Moscow for the pageant, he and Alex Sapir (whose family’s company was one of the co-developers of Trump SoHo with Trump and Felix Sater) meet with the Russian real estate developer who had facilitated Trump’s $20 million deal to host the Miss Universe contest in Moscow. They discuss plans for a new Trump project in Russia. “The Russian market is attracted to me,” Trump tells Real Estate Weekly upon his return. “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.” [Added March 3, 2017]

March 6, 2014: At the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump says: “You know, I was in Moscow a couple of months ago. I own the Miss Universe Pageant and they treated me so great. Putin even sent me a present, a beautiful present.” On the same day, President Obama signs an executive order imposing sanctions on Russia for its unlawful annexation of Crimea.

Sometime in 2014: Golf writer and co-author of Arnold Palmer’s memoir James Dodson plays golf with Donald and Eric Trump at Trump National Charlotte in North Carolina. In an interview airing May 5, 2017 on Boston’s public radio station, Dodson describes the episode, beginning with a question he asks Donald Trump before the round: “‘What are you using to pay for these courses?’ And he just sort of tossed off that he had access to $100 million. So when I got in the cart with Eric, as we were setting off, I said, ‘Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.’ And this is what he said. He said, ‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time. Now that was three years ago, so it was pretty interesting.’” On May 7, 2017, Eric Trump calls Dodson’s claim “categorically untrue” and “complete garbage.” [Added May 8, 2017]

September 2015:An FBI special agent contacts the Democratic National Committee to report that at least one DNC computer system had been hacked by an espionage team linked to the Russian government. The agent is transferred to a tech-support contractor at the help desk, who did a cursory check of DNC server logs and didn’t reply to follow-up calls from the FBI agent. [Added March 13, 2017]

Sept. 21, 2015: On Hugh Hewitt’s radio program, Trump says, “The oligarchs are under [Putin’s] control, to a large extent. I mean, he can destroy them, and he has destroyed some of them… Two years ago, I was in Moscow… I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people. I can’t go further than that, but I will tell you that I met the top people, and the relationship was extraordinary.” [Added March 3, 2017]

Sept. 29, 2015, Trump tells Bill O’Reilly: “I will tell you in terms of leadership he [Putin] is getting an ‘A,’ and our president is not doing so well.”

Nov. 10, 2015: At a Republican primary debate, Trump says: “I got to know [Putin] very well because we were both on 60 Minutes. We were stablemates, and we did very well that night.”

Late 2015: The British spy agency GCHQ alerts its American counterparts in Washington to suspicious interactions between members of the Trump campaign and known or suspected Russian agents. The GCHQ provides the information as part of a routine exchange of intelligence information. [Added April 17, 2017]

Feb. 17, 2016: As questions about Russia swirls around Trump, he changes his story: “I have no relationship with [Putin], other than he called me a genius.”

Feb. 29, 2016:Paul Manafort submits a five-page, single-spaced, proposal to Trump. In it, he outlines his qualifications for helping Trump secure enough convention delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination. Manafort describes how he had assisted rich and powerful business and political leaders, including oligarchs and dictators in Russia and Ukraine: “I have managed presidential campaigns around the world.” [Added April 10, 2017]

March 17, 2016:Jeff Sessions discusses Trump’s foreign policy positions, saying, “I think an argument can be made there is no reason for the US and Russia to be at this loggerheads. Somehow, someway we ought to be able to break that logjam. Strategically it’s not justified for either country.” [Added March 3, 2017]

May 2016:CrowdStrike determines that highly sophisticated Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries — denominated Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear — had been responsible for the DNC hack. Fancy Bear, in particular, had indicators of affiliation with Russia’s Main Intelligence Department (also know as the GRU). [Added March 13, 2017]

Early June 2016:At a closed-door gathering of high-powered foreign policy experts visiting with the prime minister of India, Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page hails Vladimir Putin as stronger and more reliable than President Obama and touts the positive effect that a Trump presidency would have on US-Russia relations. [Added March 6, 2017]

Also on June 15, 2016: After the Ukrainian prime minister visits Capitol Hill, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and other Republican leaders meet privately. During the session, McCarthy says, “I’ll guarantee you that’s what it is… The Russians hacked the DNC and got the opp [opposition] research they had on Trump.” Moments later he says, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” referring to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) who is known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia. Some of the lawmakers laugh, but McCarthy continues, “Swear to God.” According to a transcript prepared from a tape of the discussion, Ryan immediately interrupts the conversation, saying, “This is an off the record… [laughter] …NO LEAKS… [laughter] …alright? This is how we know we are a real family here… What’s said in the family, stays in the family.” When The Washington Post obtains the transcript in May 2017, it seeks comment from Ryan and McCarthy. Ryan’s spokesperson says, “That never happened. The idea that McCarthy would assert this is false and absurd.” As detailed in the Post video accompanying its eventual story, the Post reporter then says that he has a transcript of the discussion. Ryan and McCarthy respond that the transcript is false, maybe even made up, and certainly inaccurate. When the reporter says he has listened to an audio recording of the conversation, Ryan’s spokesperson says it was a failed attempt at humor. [Added May 18, 2017]

July 5, 2016:FBI Director James Comey holds a press conference announcing that the bureau has closed its yearlong investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Comey says Clinton had been “extremely careless” in handling “very sensitive, highly classified information,” but does not recommend prosecution. Typically, when the FBI recommends closing a case, the Justice Department agrees and no public statement follows. One possible reason for Comey’s unusual announcement in the Clinton case could be the contents of a document that the FBI knew Russians had stolen when they hacked the DNC. In it, a Democratic operative suggested that Attorney General Lynch would not let the Clinton email investigation go too far. Comey may have worried that if Lynch announced an end of the investigation, and Russia later leaked the document, voters would doubt the investigation’s independence. [Added April 24, 2017]

July 6, 2016: Another batch of hacked DNC documents appears on the Guccifer 2.0 website. [Added March 13, 2017]

Also on July 18, 2016:At a Heritage Foundation event during the Republican Convention, Jeff Sessions speaks individually with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. [Added March 3, 2017]

July 19, 2016:Bloomberg reports that over the past year, Trump’s debt load has almost doubled from $350 million to $630 million. [Added May 8, 2017]

Also during the July 2016 Republican Convention:Carter Page and J.D. Gordon, national security advisers to the Trump Campaign, meet with ambassador Kislyak. They stress that Trump would like to improve relations with Russia. [Revised March 6, 2017]

July 24, 2016:When ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos asks whether there were any connections between the Trump campaign and Putin’s regime, Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort answers, “No, there are not. And you know, there’s no basis to it.” [Added March 6, 2017]

July 25, 2016:Trump tweets, “The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC emails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.” [Added March 3, 2017]

July 31, 2016:Manafort denies knowing anything about the change in the Republican platform. That afternoon, Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s Russian-born adviser, spouts the Kremlin’s party line telling CNN: “Russia did not seize Crimea. We can talk about the conflict that happened between Ukraine and the Crimea… But there was no seizure by Russia. That’s an incorrect statement, characterization, of what happened.”

Also on July 31, 2016:On CNN, Jeff Sessions defends Trump’s approach to Russia: “This whole problem with Russia is really disastrous for America, for Russia and for the world,” he says. “Donald Trump is right. We need to figure out a way to end this cycle of hostility that’s putting this country at risk, costing us billions of dollars in defense, and creating hostilities.” [Added March 3, 2017]

And also on July 31, 2016:Trump tells ABC News he was not involved in the Republican Party platform change that softened America’s position on Russia’s annexation of Ukraine. [Added March 6, 2017]

Also on Aug. 5, 2016: Carter Page’s ongoing public criticism of US sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine and his praise for Putin generate increasing attention and concern. In response, Trump campaign spokesman Hope Hicks describes Page as an “informal policy adviser” who “does not speak for Mr. Trump or the campaign.” Later that month, after the FBI believes Page was no longer part of the Trump campaign, it obtains a Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) warrant to monitor his communications. The initial 90-day warrant is renewed more than once. [Added April 17, 2017]

Aug. 8, 2016:Roger Stone addresses a Broward County, Florida Republican Party group. An audience member asks (near the 46-minute mark of the video) about his predictions for an “October surprise” based on materials in the possession of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange. In response, Stone says, “I actually have communicated with Assange.” [Updated May 8, 2017]

Aug. 12, 2016:On a #MAGA podcast (around the 7-minute mark), Stone says, “I believe Julian Assange — who I think is a hero fighting the police state — has all of the emails that Huma [Abedin] and Cheryl Mills, the two Clinton aides, thought they had erased…. I think Assange has them. I know he has them. And I believe he will expose the American people to this information, you know, in the next 90 days.” [Added April 24, 2017]

Aug. 15, 2016: Continuing their private exchange, Guccifer 2.0 responds to Stone: “wow thank u for writing back and thank you for an article about me!!! do u find anything interesting in the docs I posted?” [Added March 13, 2017]

Also on Aug. 16, 2016:In an interview on The Blaze, Stone says he has “communicated” with Julian Assange through a “mutual acquaintance.” He continues, “I think that Assange is going to be very influential in this election….” [Added April 24, 2017]

Aug. 17, 2016:Guccifer 2.0 sends another private message to Stone: “I’m pleased to say that u r great man and I think I gonna read ur books” “please tell me if I can help u anyhow it would be a great pleasure to me.” [Added March 13, 2017]

Also on Aug. 17, 2016:The Associated Press reports that in 2012 Paul Manafort had secretly routed more than $2 million from Ukraine President Yanukovych’s governing pro-Russia governing party to two US lobbying firms working to influence American policy toward Ukraine. [Added April 17, 2017]

Aug. 18, 2016:In a C-SPAN interview, Stone says (around the 48-minute mark of the broadcast) that he’s never met Julian Assange, but he has been in touch with him “through an intermediary — somebody who is a mutual friend.” He continues, “I expect you’re going to see more from Mr. Assange.” [Added April 24, 2017]

Also Aug. 19, 2016: On the day he resigns from the Trump campaign, Manafort records documents creating Summerbreeze LLC, a shell company that he controls. Shortly thereafter, Summerbreeze receives a $3.5 million loan from Spruce Capital, a small New York investment firm. Spruce’s co-founder is a developer of Trump hotel projects, including Trump International Hotel and Tower in Waikiki. One of Spruce’s financial backers, Alexander Rovt, is a billionaire who made his fortune in the privatization of the fertilizer industry in post-Soviet Ukraine. On Feb. 1, 2016, Rovt had shared a Manor College stage forum about Ukraine with Andrii Artemenko, a pro-Putin member of the Ukraine Parliament. In January 2017, Artemenko would resurface at the Manhattan Loews Regency hotel on Park Avenue with long-time Trump business associate Felix Sater and Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen. During their meeting, Sater gives Cohen a sealed envelope containing Artemenko’s Ukranian-Russian peace plan and asks him to deliver it to Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. The plan would have leased Crimea to Russia for 50 or 100 years, essentially ceding to Putin the territory he had annexed illegally. [Added April 17, 2017]

Also on Aug. 21, 2016:On a local Maryland radio program, Stone denies (around the 6-minute mark of the broadcast) that Guccifer 2.0 is connected to the Russians: “The DNC leaks that nailed Deborah Wasserman Schultz in the heist against Bernie Sanders was not leaked by the Russians, it was leaked by Cruccifer [sic] 2, I should say hacked and leaked first by Cruccifer 2, well known hacker who is not in the employment of the Russians, and then WikiLeaks. So that whole claim is a canard.” [Added April 24, 2017]

Aug. 26, 2016:In an interview with Breitbart Radio, Stone says (near the 10-minute mark of the interview), “I’m almost confident Mr. Assange has virtually every one of the emails that the Clinton henchwomen, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, thought that they had deleted, and I suspect that he’s going to drop them at strategic times in the run up to the rest of this race.” [Added April 24, 2017]

Aug. 29, 2016:Stone tells a local Florida radio interviewer (around the 7-minute mark of the interview), “We’re going to, I think, see from WikiLeaks and other leakers see the nexus between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.” About Assange, he says, “Perhaps he has the smoking gun that makes this handcuff time.” [Added April 24, 2017]

Sept. 9, 2016:Guccifer 2.0 sends Roger Stone a link to a blog post about voter turnout, along with this message: “hi what do u think of the info on the turnout model for the democrats entire presidential campaign? Basically how it works is there are people who will vote party line no matter what and there are folks who will actually make a decision. The basic premise of winning an election is turnout your base (marked turnout) and target the marginal folks with persuadable advertising (marked persuadable). They spend millions calculating who is persuadable or what we call a ‘soft democrat’ and who is a ‘hard democrat.’” [Added March 13, 2017]

Sept. 16, 2016:Stone says on Boston Herald Radio (around the 12-minute mark), “I expect Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks people to drop a payload of new documents on Hillary on a weekly basis fairly soon. And that of course will answer the question of exactly what was erased on that email server.” He says he’s in touch with Assange “through an intermediary.” He also says that Hillary Clinton’s association with Putin and Russia’s oligarchs was “far more troubling to me than Donald Trump’s.” [Added April 24, 2017]

Also on Sept. 23, 2016:Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News reports US intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page had opened up private communications with senior Russian officials, including talks about the possibility of lifting economic sanctions if Trump became president. [Added April 17, 2017]

Oct. 7, 2016:In a joint statement, the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence says, “The US Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations… We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” But two other stories dominate the news cycle: WikiLeaks begins publishing stolen emails from the account of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tapes become public.

Oct. 28, 2016:In a letter to key leaders in the House and Senate, FBI Director Comey says that in connection with the bureau’s closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, it was reviewing emails on a computer belonging to Clinton adviser Huma Abedin. Comey says nothing about the ongoing FBI investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. [Added April 24, 2017]

Oct. 30, 2016:According to reporting by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, the $100 million plane belonging to the Russian oligarch who had bought a Florida residence from Trump for $95 million in 2008 was in Las Vegas on the same day Trump was holding a rally there. [Added March 6, 2017]

Oct. 31, 2016:Asked about news reports that the FBI was investigating connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, former campaign manager Manafort says, “None of it is true… There’s no investigation going on by the FBI that I’m aware of.” [Added March 6, 2017]

Nov. 3, 2016:According to reporting by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, the plane belonging to the Russian oligarch who had bought a Florida residence from Trump for $95 million in 2008 was at the single-runaway airport near Concord, North Carolina, where Trump was holding a rally. [Added March 6, 2017]

Nov. 5, 2016:In a letter to key leaders in Congress, Comey confirms that the FBI has completed its review of the additional Abedin emails and, as a result, has not changed its earlier recommendation not to recommend prosecuting Clinton for her use of a private email server. [Added April 24, 2017]

Nov. 10, 2016: During their first meeting after the election, President Obama warns Trumpabout appointing Mike Flynn to a top national security post. In 2014, Obama had removed Flynn as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. [Added May 15, 2017]

Nov. 18, 2016: Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sends Trump transition team chair (and Vice President-elect) Mike Pence a letter expressing concerns about NSA-designate Mike Flynn’s conflicts of interest. Specifically, Cummings worries about Flynn’s work for an entity affiliated with the government of Turkey, as well as a paid trip to Moscow in December 2015 during which Flynn was “highly critical of the United States.” [Added May 8, 2017]

Also in December 2016:Officials in the Obama administration become concerned that the incoming administration would cover up or destroy previously gathered intelligence relating Russia’s interference with the election. To preserve that intelligence for future investigations, they spread it across the government. [Added March 3, 2017]

Dec. 8, 2016:Carter Page is in Moscow for several days to meet with “business leaders and thought leaders.” [Added March 6, 2017]

Dec. 9, 2016: In response to a Washington Post report that the CIA had concluded Russia had intervened in the election to help Trump win, he says, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’ ”

Also on Dec. 9, 2016:Paul Manafort tells CBS News he is not active in the Trump transition. Asked if he is talking to President-elect Trump, Manafort says, “I don’t really want to talk about who I’m speaking to, but I’m aware of what’s going on.” Interviewers also question him about the appearance of his name among the handwritten entries in the Ukraine Party of Regions’ Black Ledger from 2007 to 2012 (purporting to show more than $12 million in payments to him). Manafort responds that the ledger was fabricated. [Added April 17, 2017]

Dec. 11, 2016:Trump praises Rex Tillerson, chairman of ExxonMobil and recipient of Russia’s “Order of Friendship” Medal from Vladimir Putin in 2013, as “much more than a business executive” and a “world-class player.” Trump says Tillerson “knows many of the players” and did “massive deals in Russia” for Exxon. Two days later, Trump nominates him to be secretary of state.

Also on Dec. 11, 2016: Asked about the earlier US intelligence report on hacking, Trump says, “They have no idea if it’s Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed some place. I mean, they have no idea.”

Dec. 12, 2016: While in Moscow, Trump’s former campaign surrogate Jack Kingston meets with Russian businessmen to discuss what they might expect from a Trump administration. “Trump can look at sanctions,” Kingston says. “They’ve been in place long enough.” [Added March 3, 2017.]

Dec. 29, 2016: On the same day President Obama announces sanctions against Russian in retaliation for its interference in the 2016 election, national security adviser-designate Lt. Gen. Flynn places five phone calls to the Russian ambassador.

Dec. 30, 2016: After Putin makes a surprise announcement that Russia would not retaliate for the new sanctions, Trump tweets, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) — I always knew he was very smart.”

Jan. 3, Jan. 4 and Jan. 5, 2017: Trump tweets a series of attacks on the integrity of the US intelligence community’s findings that Russia had hacked the election.

Jan. 6, 2017: The CIA, FBI and NSA release their unclassified report, concluding unanimously, “Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.” The three intelligence agencies agree that “the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible.” The report also states that WikiLeaks had been Russia’s conduit for the effort, writing “We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.” [Updated March 13, 2017]

Jan. 10, 2017: At Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearing to become attorney general, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) asks him, “If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?” Sessions answers: “I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.” [Updated March 4, 2017]

Jan. 11, 2017: At his first news conference, Trump says, “As far as hacking, I think it was Russia. But I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people.” The final question of Trump’s first news conference comes from Ann Compton of ABC News: “Mr. President-elect, can you stand here today, once and for all, and say that no one connected to you or your campaign had any contact with Russia leading up to or during the presidential campaign?” Trump never answered her. Away from cameras and heading toward the elevators, he reportedly says, “No,” his team didn’t have contact with Russia.

Jan. 13, 2017: In response to The Washington Post’s article about Flynn’s Dec. 29 conversations with the Russian ambassador, press secretary Sean Spicer says it was only one call. They “exchanged logistical information” for an upcoming call between Trump and Vladimir Putin after the inauguration.

Jan. 15, 2017: “We should trust Putin,” Trump tells The Times of London. Expressing once again his skepticism about NATO, Trump lambastes German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Also on Jan. 15, 2017: Appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation, Vice President Pence says Flynn’s call to the Russian ambassador on the same day President Obama announced new sanctions was “strictly coincidental,” explaining: “They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure on Russia…. What I can confirm, having to spoken with [Flynn] about it, is that those conversations that happened to occur around the time that the United States took action to expel diplomats had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions.”

Jan. 19, 2017:The New York Times reports that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, along with advisers Roger Stone and Carter Page, are under investigation in connection with possible links to Russia. [Added March 3, 2017]

Jan. 20, 2017: Trump is inaugurated.

Jan. 22, 2017: Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was sworn in as national security adviser, a position that does not require Senate confirmation.

Jan. 23, 2017: At Sean Spicer’s first press briefing, Spicer says that none of Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador touched on the Dec. 29 sanctions. That got the attention of FBI Director James Comey. According to The Wall Street Journal, Comey convinced acting Attorney General Sally Yates to delay informing the White House immediately about the discrepancy between Spicer’s characterization of Flynn’s calls and US intelligence intercepts showing that the two had, in fact, discussed sanctions. Comey reportedly asked Yates to wait a bit longer so that the FBI could develop more information and speak with Flynn himself. The FBI interviews Flynn shortly thereafter.

Jan. 24, 2017: According to a subsequent article in The Washington Post, Flynn reportedly denied to FBI agents that he had discussed US sanctions against Russia in his December 2016 calls with the Russian ambassador.

Jan. 27, 2017:McGahn asks Yates to return to the White House for another discussion about Flynn. He asks Yates, “Why does it matter to the Department of Justice if one White House official lies to another?” Yates explains that Flynn’s lies make him vulnerable to Russian blackmail because the Russians know that Flynn lied and could probably prove it. [Added May 15, 2017]

Also on Feb. 10, 2017: On the Friday preceding Trump’s weekend at Mar-A-Lago, the plane belonging to the Russian oligarch who had bought a Florida residence from Trump for $95 million in 2008 flies from the south of France to Miami International Airport. [Added March 6, 2017]

Feb. 13, 2017:The Washington Post breaks another story: Then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates had warned the White House in late January that Flynn had mischaracterized his December conversation with the Russian ambassador, and that it made him vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Later that evening, Flynn resigns.

Feb. 14, 2017:The New York Times corroborates the Russian deputy foreign minister’s admission on Nov. 10. Based on information from four current and former American officials, The Times reports, “Members of the Trump campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior intelligence officials in the year before the election.” Meanwhile, advisers to Attorney General Jeff Sessions reiterates his earlier position: Sessions sees no need to recuse himself from the ongoing Justice Department investigations into the Trump/Russia connections.

Also on Feb. 14, 2017: In a private Oval Office meeting, Trump asks FBI Director Comey to halt the investigation of former NSA Mike Flynn. According to Comey’s contemporaneous memorandum, Trump says, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” According to the memo, Trump tells Comey that Flynn had done nothing wrong. Comey does not say anything to Trump about halting the investigation, replying only: “I agree he is a good guy.” [Added May 17, 2017]

Feb. 15, 2017: Trump tweets a series of outbursts attacking the Trump/Russia connection as “nonsense,” diverting attention to “un-American” leaks in which “information is illegally given out by ‘intelligence’ like candy.” Shortly thereafter, Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz and other congressional Republicans formally ask the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate the leaks, but they and their GOP colleagues resist the creation of an independent bipartisan commission with the power to convene public hearings and discover the truth about the Trump/Russia connections.

Also on Feb. 15, 2017: During an afternoon appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump refuses to answer questions about connections between his presidential campaign and Russia. That evening, The New York Times reports that Trump is planning to appoint Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Trump ally, to lead “a broad review of American intelligence agencies.” Feinberg has no prior experience in intelligence or government, but he has close ties to Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner.

And also on Feb. 15, 2017:Chief of staff Reince Priebus asks FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to rebut publicly The New York Times’ story about Trump aides’ contacts with Russia during the campaign. McCabe and FBI Director Comey refuse. The White House then askssenior intelligence officials and key lawmakers — including the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees conducting the Trump/Russia investigation — to contact the media and counter the Times story themselves. [Added March 3, 2017]

Feb. 16, 2017: Trump continues his diversionary twitter assault on the intelligence leaks that were fueling intensified scrutiny of his Russia connections. At Trump’s afternoon press conference, he says: “I own nothing in Russia. I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia… Russia is fake news. Russia — this is fake news put out by the media.” Reporters ask repeatedly about anyone else involved with Trump or his campaign. “No,” Trump says. “Nobody that I know of.”

Feb. 17, 2017: FBI Director Comey meets privately with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss the Russia investigation. Immediately thereafter, the Committee sends a letter asking more than a dozen agencies, organizations and individuals — including the White House — to preserve all communications related to the Senate panel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. [Added March 3, 2017]

Feb. 25, 2017: Nigel Farage, ex-leader of the UK Independence Party, key Brexit campaigner and one of Donald Trump’s most visible foreign supporters during and after the presidential campaign, dines with Trump, daughter Ivanka, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Florida Gov. Rick Scott at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. [Added March 13, 2017]

Feb. 26, 2017:NBC’s Chuck Todd notes a pattern: Trump’s attacks on the press followed immediately after a new and unflattering Trump/Russia story breaks. [Added March 3, 2017]

Also on Feb. 28, 2017: More than 10 days after the Senate Intelligence Committee had requested that the White House and other agencies preserve Trump/Russia-related communications, the White House counsel’s office instructs Trump’s aides to preserve such materials, according to a March 1 report by the Associated Press. [Added March 3, 2017]

March 1, 2017: In response to reports in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times about Jeff Sessions’ pre-election contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sessions issues a statement saying he “never met with any Russian officials to discuss any issues of the campaign.” [Added March 3, 2017]

March 2, 2017:Trump says he has “total confidence” in Jeff Sessions and he shouldn’t recuse himself from the Russia investigation. An hour later, Sessions recuses himself “from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States.” [Revised March 13, 2017]

Also March 2, 2017: Despite an earlier denial, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page admits to meeting with Russian ambassador Kislyak during the campaign. Another adviser, J.D. Gordon, admits that he’d met with Kislyak during the Republican Convention in July. Gordon says he had successfully urged changes in the party platform that Trump had sought to soften US policy regarding Ukraine. [Added March 6, 2017]

Also on March 4, 2017:Stone tweets — then deletes — about his communications with Assange: “[N]ever denied perfectly legal back channel to Assange who indeed had the goods on #CrookedHillary.” Forty minutes later, the tweet was gone. [Added April 24, 2017]

March 5, 2017:FBI Director Comey asked the Justice Department to rebut publicly Trump’s assertion that President Obama had ordered the wiretapping of Trump’s phones. Meanwhile, Sean Spicer announces that neither Trump nor the White House would comment further on Trump/Russia matters until Congress completes an investigation into whether President Obama’s executive branch abused its powers during 2016 election. [Added March 6, 2017]

March 7, 2017:WikiLeaks releases a trove of alleged CIA documents relating to the agency’s hacking tools for smartphones, computers and internet-connected devices. [Added March 13, 2017]

Also on March 7, 2017: Michael Ellis, 32-year-old general counsel to Nunes’ intelligence committee, joins White House Counsel McGahn’s office as “special assistant to the president, senior associate counsel to the president and deputy National Security Council legal adviser.” [Added April 3, 2017]

Also on March 9, 2017: When reporters ask Sean Spicer about Nigel Farage’s meeting with Julian Assange and whether Farage was delivering a message from Trump, Sean Spicer says, “I have no idea.” [Added March 13, 2017]

March 10, 2017:Trump campaign surrogate Roger Stone admits that in August 2016 he had engaged in private direct messaging with Guccifer 2.0, whom US intelligence agencies later identified as the persona for the Russian hacking operation. Describing the messages as “completely innocuous,” Stone says, “It was so perfunctory, brief and banal I had forgotten it.” [Added March 13, 2017]

Also on March 10, 2017: Mike Flynn’s replacement as national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, tells Ezra Cohen-Watnick that he is reassigning him. Unhappy with the decision, Cohen-Watnick appeals to Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. They intervene and take the issue to Trump, who orders that Cohen-Watnick should remain in his position. [Added April 3, 2017]

March 12, 2017:John McCain tells CNN’s Jake Tapper that former Trump adviser and surrogate Roger Stone “obviously” needs to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee concerning his communications with Guccifer 2.0. McCain says that Stone should also explain fully his involvement matters relating to Ukraine’s pro-Putin former president. [Added March 20, 2017]

March 15, 2017:Roger Stone is riding in the front passenger seat of a car near Pompano Beach, Florida, when another car broadsides his, shifts gears, backs up and speeds away. In January, Stone had claimed that he was poisoned in late 2016 with polonium, a radioactive material manufactured in a nuclear reactor and used to kill former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. Litvinenko had defected to Britain and become an outspoken critic of Putin. As he lay in a hospital bed, he said Putin had been responsible for his impending death. On Jan. 21, 2016, retired British High Court Judge Sir Robert Owen concluded a House of Commons inquiry and issued a 328-page report finding that Litvinenko’s accusation was probably correct. [Added March 20, 2017]

Also on March 15, 2017: The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, says the committee has no evidence to support Trump’s March 4 wiretapping claim. “I don’t think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower,” Nunes says. “Are you going to take the tweets literally? If you are, clearly the president is wrong.” [Added March 20, 2017]

March 16, 2017: Senate Intelligence Committee leaders issue a joint statement rebutting Trump’s unfounded assertion that President Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower: “Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016.” [Added March 20, 2017]

March 17, 2017: Roger Stone says he had only just received the letter from the Senate Intelligence Committee, dated Feb. 17, asking him to preserve his records relating to Russian election interference. Quoted in The New York Times, Stone says, “I had never heard allegations that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian asset until now, and am not certain it’s correct.” He says that his 16 interactions with Guccifer 2.0, which included public Twitter posts and private messages, were all part of “exchanges,” not “separate contacts.” [Added March 20, 2017]

March 20, 2017: On the morning of FBI Director Comey’s testimony before Congress on his agency’s investigation into Russian election interference, Trump tweets: “The Democrats made up and pushed the Russian story as an excuse for running a terrible campaign. Big advantage in Electoral College & lost!” Hours later, Comey testifies that the FBI was investigating Russian interference with election, including “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.” With respect to Trump’s wiretapping claims, Comey says, “I have no information that supports those tweets.” [Added March 20, 2017]

March 21, 2017: In his daily press briefing, Sean Spicer says that, with respect to the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort had “played a very limited role for a very limited period of time.” [Added March 27, 2017]

March 22, 2017: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, bypasses his fellow committee members and goes directly to the White House with alleged evidence that Trump associates may have been “incidentally” swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies. Nunes refuses to release the information or name his sources, even to fellow committee members. And he confirms that he still had seen no evidence to support Trump’s claim that President Obama had ordered his wires tapped. [Added March 27, 2017]

Also on March 22, 2017: In a joint letter to White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, the chairman and ranking member of the House Oversight Committee request information and documents relating to payments that former national security adviser Mike Flynn received from entities affiliated with foreign governments, including Russia and Turkey. [Added May 2, 2017]

March 23, 2017:In a letter to acting Assistant Attorney General Samuel R. Ramer, Sally Yates’ lawyer disagrees with the Justice Department’s objections to Yates’ anticipated congressional testimony. Associate Deputy Attorney General Scott Schools responds that Yates’ testimony is “likely covered by the presidential communications privilege and possibly the deliberative process privilege.” But Schools adds that Yates needs only the consent of the White House, not the Justice Department, to testify. [Added April 3, 2017]

March 24, 2017: Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Roger Stone volunteer to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee. [Added March 27, 2017]

Also on March 24, 2017:Yates’ lawyer writes to White House Counsel McGahn about Yates’ upcoming testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. He notes that unless McGahn objects before 10 a.m. on March 27, Yates will appear and answer the committee’s questions. [Added April 3, 2017]

Also on March 24, 2017:Rep. Nunes cancels public hearings scheduled for March 28. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates had been slated to testify before his committee. Nunes postpones their appearances indefinitely. [Added March 27, 2017]

March 26, 2017: In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Roger Stone says, “I reiterate again, I have had no contacts or collusions with the Russians. And my exchange with Guccifer 2.0, based on the content and the timing, most certainly does not constitute collusion.” [Added March 27, 2017]

Also March 30, 2017:The New York Times reports that Nunes’ sources for the information that he’d reviewed nine days earlier on White House grounds — and then reported to Trump directly without informing anyone on his committee — are two members of the Trump administration: Ezra Cohen-Watnick (the NSC staffer whose job Trump had saved personally around March 13) and Michael Ellis (who had served as general counsel of Nunes’ committee before becoming Trump’s “special assistant, senior associate counsel and deputy National Security Council legal adviser” on March 7). [Added April 3, 2017]

Also on March 30, 2017:The Wall Street Journal reports that Mike Flynn is seeking immunity from prosecution in return for testifying before congressional intelligence committees. The next day, his lawyer confirms, “Gen. Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should circumstances permit.” [Added April 3, 2017]

March 31, 2017:Trump tweets, “Mike Flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt (excuse for big election loss), by media & Dems, of historic proportion!” [Added April 3, 2017]

Also on March 31, 2017: During an appearance with Bill Maher, Roger Stone denies that Guccifer 2.0 was an arm of Russia. “I’ve had no contacts with Russians,” he insists. [Added April 3, 2017]

April 12, 2017:The Associated Press confirms that newly obtained financial records show Paul Manafort’s firm had received two wire transfers — one in 2007 and another in 2009 — corresponding to two of the 22 entries next to Manafort’s name in Ukraine’s Party of Regions Black Ledger. Manafort’s spokesman says Manafort intended to register retroactively with the US Justice Department as a foreign agent for the work he had done on behalf of political interests in Ukraine through 2014. [Added April 17, 2017]

April 13, 2017: Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page tells ABC’s George Stephanopoulos he won’t reveal who brought him into the Trump campaign. Page also says he didn’t recall discussing the subject of easing Russian sanctions in conversations with Russian officials during his July 2016 trip to Moscow. “We’ll see what comes out in this FISA transcript,” Page says, referring to surveillance collected after the FBI obtained a secret court order to monitor him under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “Something may have come up in a conversation… I have no recollection.” Later he continues, “Someone may have brought it up. I have no recollection. And if it was, it was not something I was offering or that someone was asking for.” Page says that from the time of his departure as an adviser to the Trump campaign through Inauguration Day, he maintained “light contact” with some campaign members. [Added April 17, 2017]

April 19, 2017: The White House refuses the March 22 bipartisan request from the House Oversight Committee for more information and documents relating to payments that former national security adviser Mike Flynn received from entities affiliated with the Russian and Turkish governments. [Added May 2, 2017]

April 25, 2017:The Senate confirms Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general. Because Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from matters relating to the 2016 presidential election, including the Trump/Russia investigation, Rosenstein becomes the top Justice Department official supervising FBI Director Comey on that investigation. [Added May 15, 2017]

April 28, 2017: The chair and vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee send letters to several former Trump campaign advisers, including Carter Page, Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Among other requests, the letters ask for a “list of all meetings between you and any Russian official or representative of Russian business interests which took place between June 16, 2015 and Jan. 20, 2017.” The letters also request information about any such meetings of which they are aware, as well as all documents relating to Trump campaign communications with Russian officials or business representatives. The committee also seeks information about any financial and real estate transactions related to Russia from June 15, 2015 through Trump’s inauguration. [Added May 8, 2017]

April 29, 2017: In an interview airing on Trump’s 100th day in office, he tells CBS’ John Dickerson, “The concept of Russia with respect to us [the Trump campaign] is a total phony story.” Dickerson then asks, “You don’t think it’s phony that they, the Russians, tried to meddle in the election?” Trump answers, “That I don’t know.” Later, Trump says, “I’d love to find out what happened.” [Added May 2, 2017]

May 2, 2017: On the eve of FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Trump tweets: “FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds! The phony… Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election. Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?” [Added May 8, 2017]

May 3, 2017:In response to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who asks FBI Director Comey about Trump’s April 29, 2017 interview in which he said that the hacking of the DNC “could’ve been China, could’ve been a lot of different groups,” Comey answers, “The intelligence community with high confidence concluded it was Russia.” [Added May 8, 2017]

May 5, 2017: The chair and vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee issue a joint statement, saying: “Three days ago, Carter Page told Fox News he was cooperating with the Committee’s investigation into Russian activities surrounding the 2016 Election. Today we have learned that may not be the case.” The statement expresses the hope that Page “will live up to his publicly-expressed cooperation with our effort.” [Added May 8, 2017]

May 6-7, 2017: Trump spends the weekend at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. Since March, he’s been fuming over Comey’s congressional appearance, in which the FBI director had acknowledged the FBI’s ongoing investigation into Trump campaign ties to Russia and had refuted Trump’s false claim that President Obama had wiretapped him. In the weeks that followed, Trump grew angrier and talked about firing Comey. At Bedminister, Trump grouses over Comey’s May 3 congressional testimony — especially his comment about being “mildly nauseous” at the thought that his actions relating to the Clinton investigation might have affected the outcome of the election. [Added May 15, 2017]

May 9, 2017: Citing the May 9 recommendations of Attorney General Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, Trump fires FBI Director Comey, ostensibly because of his inappropriate statements about the Clinton email investigation prior to the 2016 election. Trump, Sessions and Rosenstein write that terminating Comey is necessary to restore trust, confidence and integrity in the FBI. In his termination letter to Comey, Trump also says he “greatly appreciates you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” [Added May 15, 2017]

Also on May 9, 2017:CNN reports that a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia had recently issued subpoenas to associates of former national security adviser Mike Flynn. [Added May 15, 2017]

Also on May 9, 2017: Late in the evening and amid bushes on the White House grounds, press secretary Sean Spicer tells reporters to “turn the lights off” before answering questions about Comey’s firing. He says that the impetus came from the deputy attorney general. “No one from the White House,” Spicer says. “That was a DOJ decision.” Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway echoes that position on CNN, reading excerpts from Rosenstein’s memo to Anderson Cooper. [Added May 15, 2017]

May 10, 2017:Vice President Mike Pence says repeatedly that Comey’s firing occurred because Sessions and Rosenstein recommended it: The deputy attorney general “came to work, sat down and made the recommendation for the FBI to be able to do its job that it would need new leadership. He brought that recommendation to the president. The attorney general concurred with that recommendation.” [Added May 15, 2017]

Also on May 10, 2017: Deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Trump had been thinking about firing Comey “since the day he was elected,” but reiterates Pence’s positionthat Sessions and Rosenstein were “absolutely” the impetus for the firing. [Added May 15, 2017]

Also on May 10, 2017: Rod Rosenstein speaks by phone with White House counsel Don McGahn. According to The Wall Street Journal, Rosenstein insists that the White House correct the misimpression that Rosenstein initiated the process leading to Comey’s firing. He suggests that he can’t work in an environment where facts aren’t reported accurately. [Added May 15, 2017]

Also on May 10, 2017: The White House releases a new timeline of the events relating to Comey’s firing. It recites that the impetus for removing Comey had come from Trump, not the deputy attorney general. But the White House acknowledges that Trump met with Sessions and Rosenstein on May 8 to discuss “reasons for removing the director” and that the attorney general and his deputy sent their written recommendations to Trump on May 9. [Added May 15, 2017]

Also on May 10, 2017: At an Oval Office meeting with Russian Ambassador Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and their aides, Trump reveals highly classified intelligenceabout the Islamic State and American counterterrorism plans. The meeting occurs because Putin had previously asked Trump to meet with Lavrov, and Trump didn’t feel he could say no. Kislyak’s attendance was unexpected. The intelligence that Trump reveals is so sensitive that it has not been shared with American allies and has been tightly restricted within the US government. Minutes after the meeting ends, Kislyak’s presence becomes known when the Russian news agency TASS publishes photographs that a Russian photographer had taken of the three men. The White House had not permitted any US news organization to attend any part of the meeting, even for photographs. [Added May 18, 2017]

Also on May 11, 2017:Trump tells NBC’s Lester Holt that he had already decided to fire Comey before his meeting with Sessions and Rosenstein: “Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey, knowing there was no good time to do it. And in fact, when I decided to do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story….” Trump also says that on three different occasions — once in person and twice over the phone — he’d asked Comey if he was under investigation for alleged ties to Russia, and Comey told him he wasn’t. And Trump tells Holt that he had sent Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) a “certified letter” from “from one of the most prestigious law firms in the country” confirming that he has “nothing to do with Russia.” [Added May 15, 2017]

Also on May 11, 2017:The New York Times reports on Trump’s one-on-one dinner with Comey on Jan. 27, when Trump asked Comey for a personal loyalty pledge that Comey refused to provide. [Added May 15, 2017]

Also on May 12, 2017: In response to questions about Trump’s early morning tweet about Comey and “tapes,” press secretary Sean Spicer refuses to answer whether Trump was taping Oval Office conversations. “The president has nothing further to add on that,” Spicer says repeatedly. [Added May 15, 2017]

Also on May 12, 2017: The White House releases a one-page May 8, 2017 letter from Trump’s outside lawyers — Sheri Dillon and William Nelson at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. The carefully worded letter states that “with a few exceptions” totaling about $100 million, Trump’s tax returns from 2005 “do not reflect” any “income from Russian sources,” “debt owed by you or [The Trump Organization] to Russian lenders,” “equity investments by Russian persons or entities,” or “equity or debt investments by you or [The Trump Organization] in Russian entities.” The letter does not define “Russian” or purport to determine whether or to what extent individuals from Russia, Ukraine, or other former Soviet-bloc countries may have used shell corporations through which they may have conducted transactions with Trump businesses. Months earlier, Dillon had developed and presented Trump’s business conflicts of interest plan whereby Trump retained all ownership in his businesses. [Added May 15, 2017]

Also May 15, 2017: National security adviser H.R. McMaster issues a 40-second “non-denial denial” of the Washington Post story that Trump disclosed highly classified intelligence to Russian Ambassador Kislyak and Foreign Minister Lavrov. McMaster says, “The story that came out tonight as reported is false… At no time, at no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed. And the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known.” The Post story had said nothing about disclosure of “intelligence sources and methods.” “I was in the room,” McMaster concludes, “It didn’t happen.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who also attended the Oval Office meeting with the Russians, issues a statement saying the group “did not discuss sources, methods or military operations.” [Added May 18, 2017]

May 16, 2017: In response to press reports that former FBI Director James Comey had written a contemporaneous memorandum documenting Trump’s Feb. 14 request to halt the Flynn investigation,the White House issues an unattributed statement that concludes: “This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the president and Mr. Comey.” [Added May 17, 2017]

Also on May 16, 2017: National security adviser McMaster tells reporters repeatedly that Trump’s disclosure of intelligence with the Russians was “wholly appropriate.” As his press conference ends, McMaster says that Trump “wasn’t even aware where this information came from. He wasn’t briefed on the source or method of the information either.” [Added May 18, 2017]

Also on May 17, 2017:Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein names former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference with the election. In a White House statement, Trump says, “As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know — there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity. I look forward to this matter concluding quickly.” [Added May 18, 2017]

Also on May 18, 2017:At a joint news conference with the president of Colombia, a reporter asks Trump whether he ever asked former Director Comey to close or back down the investigation into Michael Flynn. “No. No,” Trump answers. “Next question.” He goes on to characterize the ongoing Trump/Russia investigation as “totally ridiculous” and a “witch hunt.” Then he adds, “Director Comey was very unpopular with most people, I actually thought when I made that decision. And I also got a very, very strong recommendation, as you know, from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.” [Added May 22, 2017]

May 19, 2017:The Washington Post reports that federal investigators in the Trump/Russia matter have identified a current White House official as a significant person of interest. [Added May 22, 2017]

Also on May 19, 2017: Vice President Pence faces added scrutiny on what he knew about Flynn’s connections to Turkey and Russia — and when he knew it. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee post a Nov. 18, 2017 letter from Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) to Pence, who at the time was vice president-elect and chair of the presidential transition team. The letter expressed concerns about national security adviser-designate Flynn’s ties to those countries. In response to the posting, Pence’s spokesperson states, “The vice president stands by his comments in March upon first hearing the news regarding Gen. Flynn’s ties to Turkey and fully supports the President’s decision to ask for General Flynn’s resignation.” A White House aide adds, “I’m not sure we saw the letter.” Democrats on the House Oversight Committee then post the formal Nov. 28, 2016 transition team message acknowledging receipt of Cummings’ letter. [Added May 22, 2017]

Also on May 19, 2017:Reuters reports on efforts by White House lawyers to undermine Robert Mueller’s credibility. They’re particularly interested in a rule that restricts newly hired government lawyers from investigating clients of their former employer for at least one year. By executive order on Jan. 28, 2017, Trump had extended that period to two years; however, the Justice Department can waive the rule. Mueller’s law firm WilmerHale represents Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, but the firm says that Mueller has not personally worked with any Trump-related clients. Meanwhile, CNN reports that White House lawyers are also researching impeachment procedures. [Added May 22, 2017]

May 23, 2017: Former CIA Director John Brennan testifies before the House Intelligence Committeethat during the summer of 2016, he noticed suspicious contacts between Russian government officials and associates of Trump’s campaign. Brennan says that he knew the US election was under Russian attack and feared that the Trump campaign might be aiding the effort. [Added May 25, 2017]

May 24, 2017:In response to media reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ application for national security clearance had failed to disclose his contacts with Russian officials, Sessions says he was “instructed not to list meetings with foreign dignitaries and their staff connected with his Senate activities.” [Added May 30, 2017]

May 26, 2017:The Washington Post reports on Kushner’s Dec. 1 or 2 meeting with Russian Ambassador Kislyak at which, according to Kislyak, Kushner requested a secret and secure communication channel between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. In mid-December, an anonymous letter had tipped off The Post to what Kushner had supposedly said at the meeting. Former US intelligence officials described the idea of a backchannel using a hostile foreign power’s facilities is “disturbing” and “dangerous.” [Added May 30, 2017]

Also on May 26, 2017:The Washington Post reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee has demanded the Trump campaign to produce all Russia-related documents, emails and phone records dating to June 2015, when the campaign was launched. [Added May 30, 2017]

May 27, 2017:Reuters reports that Jared Kushner had at least three previously undisclosed contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak during and after the presidential campaign. Two were phone calls between April and November. His attorney says that Kushner “has no recollection of the calls as described” and asks Reuters for the dates that they allegedly occurred. [Added May 30, 2017]

May 31, 2017: The House Intelligence Committee approves the issuance of subpoenas to Mike Flynn, Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, and the businesses that each of them runs. Separately, several news outlets report that House Committee Chairman Nunes, who had recused himself from the committee’s Trump/Russia investigation, issued subpoenas to former Obama administration officials on the issue of “unmasking” — revealing the names of persons referenced in intelligence reports. [Added June 5, 2017]

Also on May 31, 2017:The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration is moving toward returning two suspected espionage compounds to Russia. When President Obama issued new sanctions on Dec. 29, he said that the compounds — located in New York and Maryland — were being “used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes” and had given Russia 24 hours to vacate them. [Added June 5, 2017]

June 1, 2017:Putin tells reporters that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers might have been involved in cyberattacks that interfered with the US election. “We’re not doing this on the state level,” Putin says. [Added June 5, 2017]

June 8, 2017: FBI Director Comey testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He expands on prepared remarks detailing his conversations with Trump on Jan. 27 (“loyalty dinner”), Feb. 14 (“let Flynn go”), March 30 (“lift the cloud”), and April 11 (“get out the word”). Asked why Trump fired him, Comey says, “It’s my judgment that I was fired because of the Russia investigation. I was fired in some way to change, or the endeavor was to change, the way the Russia investigation was being conducted.” On the subject of whether Trump recorded their conversations, Comey says, “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.” Later, he continues: “It never occurred to me before the president’s tweet. I’m not being facetious. I hope there are, and I’ll consent to the release of them … All I can do is hope. The president knows if he taped me, and if he did, my feelings aren’t hurt. Release all the tapes. I’m good with it.” [Added June 12, 2017]

Also on June 8, 2017: Trump’s personal attorney, Marc Kasowitz, issues a statement saying that Trump “feels completely vindicated” by Comey’s testimony. Shortly thereafter, reports circulate that Trump’s legal team is planning to file a complaint with the Justice Department inspector general against Comey for “leaking” memos of his conversations with Trump. [Added June 12, 2017]

Also on June 9, 2017:Trump accuses Comey of lying under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee and agrees “100 percent” to provide his version of events under oath. He refuses to answer whether he has tapes of his conversations with Comey. [Added June 12, 2017]

Also on June 11, 2017:The New York Times reports that in recent days, White House aides had asked Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, if it was also time for them to hire personal lawyers. Kasowitz, according to a Times source, said it was not yet necessary. [Added June 19, 2017]

June 12, 2017: After visiting the White House, Trump’s longtime friend and chief executive of Newsmax Media, Chris Ruddy, says on the PBS NewsHour that Trump “is considering, perhaps, terminating the special counsel,” Robert Mueller. When asked about the report, White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders says, “While the president has the right to, he has no intention to do so.” [Added June 19, 2017]

Also on June 13, 2017: Testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein says he would need “good cause” to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and he hasn’t seen any yet. [Added June 19, 2017]

Also on June 15, 2017: Vice President Pence hires an outside attorney to deal with issues arising from the Trump/Russia investigation. [Added June 19, 2017]

Also on June 15, 2017:The Washington Post reports that, “according to US officials familiar with the matter,” special counsel Mueller is investigating the finances and business dealings of Jared Kushner. [Added June 19, 2017]

Also on June 16, 2017:ABC News reports that Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein has acknowledged to colleagues that he may have to recuse himself from the Trump/Russia investigation. Reportedly, he informed Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand — whom the Senate had confirmed on May 18 — that she would then assume supervisory responsibility for special counsel Mueller’s investigation. [Added June 19, 2017]

Also on June 16, 2017: House investigators reportedly want to interview Brad Parscale, digital director of Trump’s campaign. Investigators were digging into Jared Kushner’s role overseeing data operations for the campaign. [Added June 19, 2017]

June 18, 2017: Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, one of Trump’s attorneys, Jay Sekulow, counters Trump’s tweet about “being investigated.” Sekulow says, “There is not an investigation of the president of the United States, period.” He asserts a similar position on Fox News Sunday and CNN’s State of the Union. Appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation, Sekulow says, “The fact of the matter is the president has not been and is not under investigation.” Later in the interview, he says, “There has been no notification from the special counsel’s office that the president is under investigation.” When asked if the special counsel had an obligation to notify Trump if he were under investigation, Sekulow responds, “I can’t imagine a scenario where the president would not be aware of it.” Referring to the president’s power to fire the FBI director, Sekulow adds, “The president cannot be investigated, or certainly cannot be found liable for engaging in an activity he clearly has power to do under the constitution.” [Added June 19, 2017]

Also on June 18, 2017: In response to reports that Jared Kushner is seeking to supplement his legal team with experienced criminal defense lawyers, his lead attorney, Jamie Gorelick, says, “After the appointment of our former partner Robert Mueller as special counsel, we advised Mr. Kushner to obtain the independent advice of a lawyer with appropriate experience as to whether he should continue with us as his counsel.” [Added June 19, 2017]

Also on June 21, 2017:The New York Times reports that the White House has been lobbying the House of Representatives to weaken the Senate bill that would limit Trump’s power to curtail Russian sanctions. The bipartisan legislation had passed the Senate a week earlier, and would allow Congress to thwart any effort by the White House to curtail those sanctions without congressional approval. On June 20, the Treasury Department issued sanctions directed against more than three dozen Russian individuals and organizations that had participated in the country’s incursion into Ukraine. [Added June 26, 2017]

June 23, 2017: In an interview on Fox & Friends, Trump says that special counsel Robert Mueller is “very, very good friends with Comey, which is very bothersome… Look, there has been no obstruction. There has been no collusion. There has been leaking by Comey.” Asked about Mueller’s legal team, Trump says, “I can say that the people that have been hired are all Hillary Clinton supporters. Some of them worked for Hillary Clinton. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous if you want to know the truth.” [Added June 26, 2017]

Also on June 23, 2017:The New York Times reports that federal investigators and the New York state attorney general are looking into Paul Manafort’s real estate dealings in recent years. [Added June 26, 2017]

June 25, 2017:Interviewing Kellyanne Conway on ABC News’ This Week, George Stephanopoulos says, “The president said he did not tape James Comey, but I am confused by the top part of that . Does the president have any evidence at all that his personal conversations were somehow taped? And has he asked the intelligence agencies for that evidence?” When Conway doesn’t answer those questions directly, Stephanopoulos persists, “Has the president asked the intelligence agencies if they have any tapes of his conversations? Does he know if they have that? Does he have any evidence to back up that suggestion that he put out in the tweet?” Conway answers, “I’m not going to comment on his conversations with his intelligence community… I mean, what are we talking about here with this never-ending Russian discussion?” [Added June 26, 2017]

Also on June 26, 2017: Jared Kushner’s lawyers confirm that he has added a prominent criminal defense trial lawyer, Abbe Lowell, to his legal team. [Added July 3, 2017]

June 27, 2017:Paul Manafort registers retroactively as a foreign agent. Between 2012 and 2014 he received more than $17 million from the pro-Russia political party (“Party of Regions”) that dominated Ukraine before its leader, then-President Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Moscow amid a popular uprising in 2014. As part of the filing, Manafort discloses that he met in 2013 with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, an outspoken California Republican who has often called for a closer relationship between the US and Russia. [Added July 3, 2017]

July 6, 2017: En route to the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany where he will meet privately with Vladimir Putin, Trump stops in Poland to deliver a speech. At a news conference NBC News’ Hallie Jackson asks: “Can you once and for all, yes or no, definitively say that Russia interfered in the 2016 election?” Trump answers, “I think it could very well have been Russia, but I think it could have been other people in other countries and I won’t be specific.” He then excoriates President Obama for doing “nothing” in the face of the Obama administration’s conclusion that Russian meddling was underway. “The reason is, he thought Hillary was going to win,” Trump continues. Pressed again on whether he agrees with the “definitive” conclusion of his own intelligence agencies that Russia meddled in the election, Trump says, “I think it was Russia, but I think it was probably other people and/or countries…. Nobody really knows for sure. I remember when I was sitting back listening about Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How everybody was 100 percent sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Guess what — that led to one big mess. They were wrong.” [Added July 11, 2017]

Also on July 6, 2017:The Financial Times reports that Felix Sater has agreed to cooperate in an international investigation of a Kazakh family’s real estate dealings. The head of the family — Viktor Khrapunov, a former Kazakh minister now exiled in Switzerland — is reportedly under investigation for allegations that he embezzled government funds and hid the cash in other countries throughout the world, including the US. Deeds and banking records obtained by the Financial Times show that in April 2013, members of the Khrapunov family purchased three apartments in Trump SoHo for a grand total price of $3.1 million from a holding company in which Trump held a stake. [Added July 11, 2017]

July 7, 2017: For the first time since the 2016 election, Trump meets Vladimir Putin. The only other attendees to their private two-and-a-half hour session are Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and two interpreters. [Added July 11, 2017]

Also on July 7, 2017: In an off-camera interview with the press after the Trump/Putin meeting, Tillerson says that Trump opened the session by “raising the concerns of the American people regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election…. The president pressed President Putin on more than one occasion regarding Russian involvement. President Putin denied such involvement, as I think he has in the past.” Responding to a later question about whether Trump “was unequivocal in his view that Russia did interfere in the election,” Tillerson says, “The Russians have asked for proof and evidence. I’ll leave that to the intelligence community to address the answer to that question. And again, I think the president, at this point, he pressed him and then felt like at this point let’s talk about how do we go forward.” [Added July 11, 2017]

Also on July 7, 2017: Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov offers a different version of the Trump/Putin meeting, saying, “President Trump said he’s heard Putin’s very clear statements that this is not true and that the Russian government didn’t interfere in the elections and that he accepts these statements. That’s all.” [Added July 11, 2017]

July 8, 2017: At a press conference concluding the G-20 summit, Putin responds to questions about whether Russian meddling in the 2016 election was a subject of their private meeting. “[Trump] really was interested in some details. I, as far as I could, answered all this in detail,” Putin says through a translator at the press conference, which a Russian state-owned news channel broadcasted. “He asked me, I answered. He asked clarifying questions, I explained. He appeared to me satisfied with these answers.” [Added July 11, 2017]

Also on July 8, 2017:The New York Times first reports the story of the June 9, 2016 meeting that Donald Jr. had arranged with Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and a Kremlin-connected lawyer. In response, Donald Jr. issues this statement: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up… I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.” [Added July 11, 2017]

July 9, 2017: As The New York Times prepares to report that the Russian lawyer with whom Donald Jr., Kushner and Manafort met on June 9, 2016 was supposedly going to be offering them damaging information on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. issues a new statement changing his story from less than 24 hours earlier: “I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign. I was not told her name prior to the meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to attend, but told them nothing of the substance. We had a meeting in June 2016. After pleasantries were exchanged, the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information. She then changed subjects and began discussing the adoption of Russian children and mentioned the Magnitsky Act. It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting. I interrupted and advised her that my father was not an elected official, but rather a private citizen, and that her comments and concerns were better addressed if and when he held public office. The meeting lasted approximately 20 to 30 minutes. As it ended, my acquaintance apologized for taking up our time. That was the end of it and there was no further contact or follow-up of any kind. My father knew nothing of the meeting or these events.” [Added July 11, 2017]

Also on July 10, 2017:Donald Trump Jr. confirms that he has hired a criminal defense attorney to represent him in connection with the Trump/Russia probe. [Added July 11, 2017]

Also on July 10, 2017:The New York Times reports on the email from Rob Goldstone to Donald Jr. preceding the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower among Donald Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties. [Added July 11, 2017]

July 11, 2017: Donald Jr. posts his June 3-8, 2016 email exchanges with Rob Goldstone that culminate in the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with the person Goldstone described as a “Russian government attorney.” In his accompanying statement, Donald Jr. says that he knew Emin from the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow. “Emin and his father have a very highly respected company in Moscow,” he continues. “The information they suggested they had about Hillary Clinton I thought was political opposition research…To put this in context, this occurred before the current Russian fever was in vogue.” [Added July 11, 2017]

Also on July 11, 2017:Yahoo! News’Michael Isikoff reports that earlier plans with the Agalarovs to build a Trump Tower in Moscow continued into 2014 and collapsed because the US imposed sanctions on Russia. [Added July 17, 2017]

July 12, 2017:Trump tells Reuters that he had learned only recently about the June 9, 2016 meeting among Don Jr., Kushner, Manafort and a Russian lawyer. “I didn’t know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this,” he said. Trump repeats that assertion while speaking with reporters that night on Air Force One en route to Paris. “I only heard about it two or three days ago,” he says. But then he adds, “In fact maybe it was mentioned at some point,” but when asked if he had been told that the meeting was about sharing “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, he says no. [Added July 17, 2017]

Also on July 12, 2017:In a Fox News interview, Vice President Mike Pence’s spokesperson refuses to answer directly whether Pence ever met with any Russians during the presidential campaign. [Added July 17, 2017]

July 13, 2017:The Chicago Tribune reports that on May 14, 2017, Peter W. Smith was found dead in a Rochester, Minnesota hotel room. The GOP operative from Lake Forest, Illinois had died about 10 days after an interview with The Wall Street Journal, in which he claimed during the campaign to have connections to Trump adviser Mike Flynn. Smith had told The Journal that over the Labor Day weekend 2016, he began trying to recruit a team of experts to find any emails that were stolen from the private email server that Hillary Clinton used while she was secretary of state. Smith’s Minnesota state death record says he committed suicide by asphyxiation. The police had recovered a note that included these lines; “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER” — “RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017” and timing related “TO LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING.” The Wall Street Journal reporter who had interviewed Smith in May tweets:

When I spoke to Peter Smith I had no indication that he was ill or planning to take his own life.

Also on July 13, 2017:Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff reports that President Trump’s legal team had been informed more than three weeks earlier about the email chain arranging a June 2016 meeting between his son Donald Jr. and a Kremlin-connected lawyer. [Added July 17, 2017]

July 14, 2017:NBC News reports, “The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and others on the Trump team after a promise of compromising material on Hillary Clinton was accompanied by a Russian-American lobbyist — a former Soviet counterintelligence officer who is suspected by some US officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence.” The lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin, confirms to the Associated Press that he attended the meeting. He tells AP he served in the Soviet military in a unit that was part of counterintelligence, but was never formally trained as a spy. Akhmetshin also says the Russian lawyer at the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, presented the Trump associates with details of what she believed were illicit funds that had been funneled to the Democratic National Committee. And she suggested that making the information public could help the Trump campaign. “This could be a good issue to expose how the DNC is accepting bad money,” Akhmetshin recalls her saying. He says the attorney brought with her a plastic folder with printed-out documents, but he was unaware of the content of the documents or whether they were provided by the Russian government, and it was unclear whether she left the materials with the Trump associates. [Added July 17, 2017]

Also on July 14, 2017:CNN reports that the June 9, 2016 meeting included more than just the six previously reported participants: Kushner, Manafort, Don Jr., Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, former Soviet counterintelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin and a translator. According to CNN, at least two others — including a representative of the Agalarov family — also attended. [Added July 17, 2017]

Also on July 14, 2017: Jared Kushner’s attorney, Jamie Gorelick, announces she is no longer representing Kushner on Russia-related inquiries. [Added July 17, 2017]

July 17, 2017:Trump tweets about his top campaign advisers’ June 9, 2016 meeting with the Russians:

Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!

Also on July 17, 2017: In his daily press briefing, Sean Spicer repeats the debunked claim that at their June 9, 2017 meeting, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and the Russians discussed only the adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act. (The 2012 US law froze the assets of particular Russians suspected of human rights abuses and barred them from entering the US. It also prompted Putin to ban such adoptions by Americans.) “There was nothing, as far as we know, that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for a discussion about adoption and the Magnitsky Act,” Spicer says. [Added July 24, 2017]

July 18, 2017:CNN and The Washington Post reveal the identity of the eighth person at a secret June 9, 2016 meeting among Trump’s top campaign advisers and several Russians. In addition to the previously reported attendees — Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Emin Agalarov’s publicist Rob Goldstone, Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, former Soviet counterintelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin and translator Anatoli Samochornov — Aras Agalarov sent one of his associates, Ike Kaveladze, to the meeting. According to Agalarov’s lawyer, Kaveladze is a vice president focusing on real estate and finance for Agalarov’s company, the Crocus Group.

Kaveladze has an interesting history. Born in the Soviet Republic of Georgia, he came to the United States in 1991. In 2000, a Congressional inquiry led to a Government Accounting Office report that Kaveladze had set up more than 2,000 corporations in Delaware for Russian brokers and then opened the bank accounts for them, without knowing who owned the corporations. According to contemporaneous reporting in The New York Times, “The GAO report said nothing about the sources of the money. In view of past investigations into laundering, this wave was highly likely to have arisen from Russian executives who were seeking to avoid taxes, although some money could be from organized crime… In an interview, Mr. Kaveladze said he had engaged in no wrongdoing. He described the GAO investigation as a ‘witch hunt.’” [Added July 24, 2017]

July 19, 2017: The Trump administration reveals it has ended the covert American program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad — a move that Russia had long sought. [Added July 24, 2017]

Also on July 19, 2017: In an expansive interview with reporters for The New York Times, Trump discusses his most recently disclosed second conversation with Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit. “So the meal was going,” Trump says, “and toward dessert I went down just to say hello to Melania, and while I was there I said hello to Putin. Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about — things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.” [Added July 24, 2017]

Also on July 19, 2017: In the Times interview, Trump talks about the June 9, 2016 meeting among his top campaign advisers and several Russians: “As I’ve said — most other people, you know, when they call up and say, ‘By the way, we have information on your opponent,’ I think most politicians — I was just with a lot of people, they said [inaudible], ‘Who wouldn’t have taken a meeting like that?’” [Added July 24, 2017]

Also on July 19, 2017: In the Times interview, Trump also talks about the email exchange in which Don Jr. set up the June 9 meeting: “Well, I never saw the email. I never saw the email until, you know—” When asked if he knew about the meeting at the time, Trump says, “No, I didn’t know anything about the meeting… No, nobody told me. I didn’t know noth— It’s a very unimportant — sounded like a very unimportant meeting.” [Added July 24, 2017]

Also on July 19, 2017: In the Times interview, Trump lashes out at Attorney General Jeff Sessions: “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.” Later, he continues, “What Jeff Sessions did was he recused himself right after, right after he became attorney general. And I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ I would have — then I said, ‘Who’s your deputy?’ So his deputy he hardly knew, and that’s Rosenstein, Rod Rosenstein, who is from Baltimore. There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any.” [Added July 24, 2017]

Of the Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, when Comey told Trump about the infamous Steele dossier, Trump said: “He shared it so that I would think he had it out there” as leverage against Trump.Of the Feb. 14, 2017, meeting, when Trump said he hoped Comey could see his way to “letting Flynn go,” Trump said: “He said I said ‘hope’ — ‘I hope you can treat Flynn good’ or something like that. I didn’t say anything. But even if he did — like I said at the news conference on the, you know, Rose Garden — even if I did, that’s not — other people go a step further. I could have ended that whole thing just by saying — they say it can’t be obstruction because you can say: ‘It’s ended. It’s over. Period.’”

“Did you shoo other people out of the room when you talked to Comey?” the reporters ask.

“No, no,” Trump answers. “No. That was the other thing. I told people to get out of the room. Why would I do that?”

“Did you actually have a one-on-one with Comey then?” asks the Times reporter.

“Not much,” Trump says. “Not even that I remember. He was sitting, and I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff. He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, OK?” [Added July 24, 2017]

Also on July 19, 2017: In the Times interview, Trump talks about the Rosenstein memo used to cover up the reasons he fired Comey: “Then Rosenstein becomes extremely angry because of Comey’s Wednesday press conference, where he said that he would do the same thing he did a year ago with Hillary Clinton, and Rosenstein became extremely angry at that because, as a prosecutor, he knows that Comey did the wrong thing. Totally wrong thing. And he gives me a letter, OK, he gives me a letter about Comey. And by the way, that was a tough letter, OK. Now, perhaps I would have fired Comey anyway, and it certainly didn’t hurt to have the letter, OK. But he gives me a very strong letter, and now he’s involved in the case. Well, that’s a conflict of interest.” [Added July 24, 2017]

Also on July 19, 2017: In the Times interview, Trump discusses special counsel Mueller, whom Trump had interviewed for the FBI director job. “The day before! Of course, he was up here, and he wanted the job,” Trump says, “So, now what happens is, he leaves the office. [Deputy Attorney General Rod] Rosenstein leaves the office. The next day, he is appointed special counsel. I said, what the hell is this all about? Talk about conflicts? But he was interviewing for the job. There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point.”

Asked if Mueller’s investigation into his and his family’s finances unrelated to Russia would be a breach of Mueller’s charge, Trump answers, “I would say yeah. I would say yes. By the way, I would say, I don’t — I don’t — I mean, it’s possible there’s a condo or something, so, you know, I sell a lot of condo units, and somebody from Russia buys a condo, who knows? I don’t make money from Russia. In fact, I put out a letter saying that I don’t make — from one of the most highly respected law firms, accounting firms. I don’t have buildings in Russia. They said I own buildings in Russia. I don’t. They said I made money from Russia. I don’t. It’s not my thing. I don’t, I don’t do that. Over the years, I’ve looked at maybe doing a deal in Russia, but I never did one. Other than I held the Miss Universe pageant there eight, nine years…” Asked what would happen if Mueller went “outside of certain parameters” of his charge, Trump says, “I can’t answer that question because I don’t think it’s going to happen.” [Added July 24, 2017]

July 20, 2017:The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg report that Mueller is looking at possible money laundering by Paul Manafort. Bloomberg adds that the special counsel is also investigating “a broad range of transactions involving Trump’s businesses as well as those of his associates.” They include “Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a controversial SoHo development in New York with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008.” One of Trump’s lawyers responds that such transactions are, in his view, “well beyond the mandate of the special counsel.” [Added July 24, 2017]

Also on July 20, 2017: The Senate Judiciary Committee reveals that it has pre-approved subpoenas for Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort. According to chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA), if Don Jr. and Manafort do not accept the committee’s invitation to appear the following week, the subpoenas will issue “almost immediately.” Meanwhile, Jared Kushner is also scheduled to appear for a staff interview with the Senate Intelligence Committee the following week. [Added July 24, 2017]

Also on July 20, 2017:The New York Times and The Washington Post report that Trump’s lawyers are investigating possible ways to limit or block Mueller’s investigation, including possible conflicts of interest involving members of Mueller’s legal team, as well as the president’s power to pardon associates, family members and himself. One of Trump’s attorneys responds that the story is “nonsense.” [Added July 24, 2017]

July 21, 2017:Reuters reports that from 2005 to 2013, Natalia Veselnitskaya — the Russian lawyer in attendance at the June 9, 2016 meeting that included Kushner, Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. — represented successfully the Russian FSB’s interests in a legal dispute over ownership of an upscale property in northwest Moscow. The FSB is the successor to the Soviet-era KGB that Vladimir Putin headed before he became Russian president. [Added July 24, 2017]

Also on July 21, 2017:The Washington Post breaks the story that US intelligence intercepts of Russian Ambassador Kislyak’s reports to Moscow of his conversations with then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) in April and July 2016 are at odds with Sessions’ repeated denials about the content of those discussions. The intercepts purportedly reveal that Sessions and Kislyak “had ‘substantive’ discussions on matters including Trump’s positions on Russia-related issues and prospects for US-Russia relations in a Trump administration.” A Justice Department spokesperson responds that Sessions “never met with or had any conversations with any Russians or any foreign officials concerning any type of interference with any campaign or election.” She does not deny that Sessions discussed campaign or policy issues more generally with Kislyak. [Added July 24, 2017]

July 24, 2017:Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session, Kushner describes his three previously disclosed contacts with Russian officials prior to the inauguration, as well as a fourth previously undisclosed meeting with Russian Ambassador Kislyak on April 27, 2016 at the Mayflower Hotel. Kushner says that he doesn’t recall either of the two calls with Kislyak between April and November 2016 that Reuters had previously reported, and he is “highly skeptical those calls took place.” He says he attended the June 9, 2016 meeting with Don Jr., Manafort and several Russians only for “10 or so minutes,” and when he got there, they were “talking about the issue of a ban on US adoptions of Russian children.” Kushner acknowledges his post-election meeting with Mike Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak at Trump Tower, at which Kushner says he asked if Kislyak had “an existing communications channel at his embassy we could use where they would be comfortable transmitting the information they wanted to relay to Gen. Flynn.” But Kushner denies that he was suggesting a “secret back channel.” Finally, Kushner acknowledges a Dec. 13, 2016 meeting with Russian banker Sergey Gorkov, who, Kushner believed at the time, had “a direct line to the Russian president, who could give insight into how Putin was viewing the new administration and best ways to work together.” Kushner says that his ongoing revisions to his security clearance form SF-86 were the result of a “prematurely submitted” original application.

Kushner’s prepared remarks conclude: “I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government. I had no improper contacts. I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector. I have tried to be fully transparent with regard to the filing of my SF-86 form, above and beyond what is required. Hopefully, this puts these matters to rest.” [Added July 24, 2017]

One of the casualties of the first six months of the Trump presidency is a common understanding of what is normal in our politics. It’s easy to grow numb to abnormal actions, words and tactics.

But even our readers who love or feel loyalty to Trump need to remember that it’s just not normal.

Why it matters: We’re getting inured to the daily whirlwind. Each day’s jaw drop or outrage seems to be topped by tomorrow’s. Keep your head, even if all about you are losing theirs.

It’s not normal for the presumptive nominee’s son to take a meeting with a Russian lawyer who claims she has dirt compiled by Russian governmental forces who want to see your guy win.

It’s not normal for the President to sign off on a public cover-up of that meeting when confronted with the facts.

It’s not normal for the President to hold a Cabinet meeting that consists of his staff gushing over him.

It’s not normal for the President to undermine his West Wing staff by continually asking friends and visitors for their opinions on various replacement options.

It’s not normal for the President to make a deal with his Russian counterpart for an “impenetrable Cyber Security unit,” let his Treasury Secretary out on a Sunday show to enthusiastically defend the idea, then pull the plug that night after ridicule from fellow Republicans.

It’s not normal for the President to interrupt his day to watch the press briefing on TV, and critiquing the answers à la “SportsCenter.”

It’s not normal for the President to obsess about cable-news coverage of himself, and instantly react to stories before checking the specifics.

It’s not normal for the President to irritate and offend key allies by failing to re-articulate the country’s devotion to their alliance, only to offer the reassurance weeks later, after the damage is done.

It’s not normal for the President to publicly criticize the mayor of London on the basis of flawed facts, right after a terror attack that killed seven.

It’s not normal for the President to attack TV news hosts by name, including a personal attack on a woman’s intellect and appearance.

Game of Trump

Presidents Trump and Emmanuel Macron reviewing troops at a ceremony Thursday in Paris.

STEPHEN CROWLEY / THE NEW YORK TIMES

JULY 15, 2017

Maureen Dowd

WASHINGTON — Wicked siblings willing to do anything for power. Secret deals with sworn enemies. The shock of a dead body. A Wall. Foreign bawds, guns for hire, and snakes. Back-stabbing, betrayal and charges of treason. Little birds spying and tattling. A maniacal mad king and his court of scheming, self-absorbed princesses and princelings, swathed in the finest silk and the most brazen immorality, ruling with total disregard for the good of their people.

The night in Washington is dark and full of terrors. The Game of Trump has brought a pagan lawlessness never before seen in the capital.

So far in life, Donald Trump has survived and thrived on the same philosophy espoused by Littlefinger in “Game of Thrones”: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.”

But is the rampant deception and corruption in his gaudy, jangly realm about to engulf the Emperor of Chaos? Is this the grisly endgame for Cersei in King’s Landing and Donald in Washington? A talent to distract on Twitter, our Joffrey-like president will learn, is not the same as the ability to walk through fire.

The crowds are swelling, yelling: “Shame. Shame. Shame.”

Hugging their tattered brand, the family tried for a respite this weekend. Ivanka and Jared fled to Sun Valley to hang out with the global elite at Herb Allen’s conference. After escaping to the City of Light for Bastille Day — poor battered Sean Spicer had to settle for a party at the French Embassy here — Trump and Melania were going to his Bedminster club to attend the U.S. Women’s Open being held there. (Some women protested, saying the Open should be closed to Donald Trump.)

Trump always inflates his numbers, using his own special brand of ego arithmetic. But Don Jr. and Jared have been busy deflating their numbers.

Don Jr. pooh-poohed the meeting revealed in The New York Times’s scoop that he met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with Kremlin contacts, and Rob Goldstone, a publicist who represents a Russian pop star who featured Trump in his music video. But it later turned out there was more to the picture.

First we learned there were six, not four, people in the meeting, including a lobbyist who just happened to be a former member of the Soviet unit dealing in counterintelligence. Then we found out there were eight. Next, we’ll find out Putin was FaceTiming from Moscow.

Don Jr. was not ashamed that he had gleefully met with Russians to collect dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was only annoyed, as he told Sean Hannity in the womb of Fox News, that the meeting turned out to be “a nothing” and “just a wasted 20 minutes.” The thought that it was improper has not entered his mind.

Jared Kushner has had to amend his list of foreign contacts three times, adding more than 100 names that had somehow eluded him. “His lawyers have said this was inadvertent and that a member of his staff had prematurely hit the ‘send’ button for the form before it was completed,” Michael Isikoff wrote in Yahoo News.

No one in Washington, a land intimately familiar with obnoxiously oppressive forms, believed that. As Vox noted: “But the thing is, there isn’t one ‘send button’ for this kind of security clearance form. There are 28.”

As theater, the Trump saga is spectacular, with a dazzling collection of fools and jesters. Who could make up Rob Goldstone, the rotund, vodka-swilling, chocolate-inhaling, British publicist who liked to party at the Russian Tea Room?

The Daily Beast recalled that back in the ’80s, when Goldstone represented John Denver and Michael Jackson, he went to Ethiopia for Band Aid, a rock concert to help famine victims, and managed to gain seven pounds. As he explained to The Sydney Morning Herald, “I mean, what else is there to do in a country like Ethiopia but eat?” In 2010, Goldstone wrote an essay in The Times on “The Tricks and Trials of Traveling While Fat.”

And who possibly could concoct Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz? According to ProPublica, after a man watching Rachel Maddow emailed Kasowitz Wednesday telling him to “Resign Now,” the lawyer shot back with a bunch of nasty messages, such as “Watch your back, bitch” and “I already know where you live, I’m on you. … You will see me. I promise. Bro.”

Kasowitz, ProPublica reports, has a drinking problem that could hamper him getting a security clearance. He has grown increasingly frustrated by Trump’s lack of discipline as the president sulks and rages in his tent over the Russia labyrinth, according to The Washington Post.

So this lawyer is the one trying to instill discipline in that president?

In an interview with reporters on Air Force One on the way to Paris, President Trump once more tried to deflect blame from Russia for the election hacks. “And I’m not saying it wasn’t Russia,” he said. “What I’m saying is that we have to protect ourselves no matter who it is. You know, China is very good at this. I hate to say it, North Korea is very good at this. Look what they did to Sony Studios.”

He bragged about his cunning when he brought up the hacks with Putin. After citing it once, Trump said, “I then said to him again, in a totally different way.”

Wow. That must have really outfoxed the lethal former K.G.B. agent. You know nothing, Donald Trump.

Trump defended his beleaguered oldest son — who is the same age as Emmanuel Macron — as “a good boy.” Don Jr. certainly learned Trump family values.

In the immortal words of the villainous Ramsay Bolton on “Game of Thrones”: “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”

Every Wednesday afternoon, in a windowless conference room in an office building at the tip of lower Manhattan, David Pecker decides what will be on the cover of the following week’s National Enquirer. Pecker is the longtime chief executive of American Media, Inc., which owns most of the nation’s supermarket tabloids and gossip magazines, including the Star, the Globe, the Examiner, and OK!, as well as the flagship Enquirer.Pecker’s tabloids have few subscribers and minimal advertising. Virtually all their revenue comes from impulse purchases at the checkout counter. A successful Enquirer cover can drive sales fifteen per cent above the weekly average of three hundred and twenty-five thousand copies, and a lemon can hurt sales just as badly, so the choice of cover headlines and photographs represents a nearly existential challenge every week.

Pecker started in the media business as an accountant, and he has attempted to impose a numbers-based rigor on the raucous world of tabloids. In the past decade, he has devised a proprietary database of the covers of all celebrity magazines, including those of his competitors. The “cover explorer,” as it’s known internally, tells A.M.I. executives how each cover sold in comparison with the magazine’s four- and thirteen-week averages. The explorer is indexed by celebrities and, uniquely, by words in the headlines. Pecker knows with some precision which stars sell (Kelly Ripa, Jennifer Aniston, Brad and Angelina, and, for the older generation, Dolly Parton and the Kennedys), and which phrases draw readers (headlines with the words “sad last days” and “six months to live”).

To open a recent meeting, Pecker, who was calling in on speakerphone from Dallas, asked Dylan Howard, A.M.I.’s chief content officer, to review the competition’s covers from the previous week. Howard, an ebullient Australian, is thirty-five, and something of a tabloid prodigy. He made his name with a three-year quest to prove that the actor Charlie Sheen had contracted H.I.V. (which Sheen ultimately acknowledged), and now supervises celebrity coverage for Pecker’s empire. Shuffling through a stack of magazines in front of him, Howard pulled out Life & Style, which is owned by Bauer, a German conglomerate. The issue featured Jennifer Lopez on the cover, with a headline claiming that she was expecting a child with her boyfriend, Alex Rodriguez. “her ‘miracle’ baby at 47!” the cover announced. Howard dismissed the story. “She’s forty-seven,” he said. “Of course she’s not pregnant.” But there was another reason for Howard’s disdain. “J. Lo doesn’t sell,” he said.

For the forthcoming issue of the Enquirer, Howard presented a mockup of a cover on Megyn Kelly, who would be making her début as an NBC News correspondent the week that the issue went on sale. The headline read “what she’s hiding!,” which Pecker praised because the phrase had worked well on another coverline, “what hillary’s hiding!,” during the Presidential campaign. Bullet points under the Kelly headline promised revelations about plastic surgery and a “criminal past.”

Pecker believes in constant market research, so the Enquirer conducts a rolling telephone poll in which it tests cover-story ideas, summarized in a sentence or two, on readers. Howard felt optimistic about the Kelly cover, because seventy-three per cent of respondents said that they would be interested in the story. “She got over seventy per cent, even without the benefit of seeing the cover image,” Howard said, referring to a high-school-yearbook photograph of Kelly with an eighties-style perm, which he felt would attract buyers.

For the “skyboxes,” the block headlines above the cover logo, Howard proposed an unflattering recent photograph of the actress Eva Longoria, which had tested at sixty-eight per cent, under the headline “packs on 40 pounds!” Howard explained, “We did ask the rep if she’s pregnant. Unfortunately for her, that just seems to be a burrito belly.” A photo in the other skybox was of Pamela Anderson, also in an unbecoming shot, who was, according to the headline, “destroyed by plastic surgery!”

Pecker called on Cameron Stracher, the Enquirer’s lawyer, to see if he anticipated any legal problems with the Kelly story. “We know she got the ‘comment call,’ ” Stracher said. At the Enquirer, these offers for comment on critical articles are routinely made to subjects and just as often declined. “It’s factually accurate,” Stracher continued. “She did have this surgery, she does have a criminal past, and the other stuff is opinion, really.” (In a recent memoir, Kelly acknowledged shoplifting, once, when she was twelve. So she was not “hiding” much at all.)

As the meeting wound down, the discussion turned to the following week’s issue. Someone suggested a story about a video from Donald and Melania Trump’s first overseas trip. The video, which had just gone viral, showed the couple walking down a red carpet on the airport tarmac in Israel. When Donald reached for Melania’s hand, she slapped it away with a sharp flick of her wrist.

“I didn’t see that,” Pecker said, on the speakerphone.

The half-dozen or so men in the room exchanged looks. One then noted that the footage of Melania’s slap had received a good deal of attention.

“I didn’t see that,” Pecker repeated, and the subject was dropped.

It was a telling moment. Even if the leader of a celebrity-news empire had missed the viral video from the President’s trip, Pecker’s decision to ignore the awkward moment for the First Family was not surprising. The Enquirer is defined by its predatory spirit—its dedication to revealing that celebrities, far from leading ideal lives, endure the same plagues of disease, weight gain, and family dysfunction that afflict everyone else. For much of the tabloid’s history, it has specialized in investigations into the foibles of public personalities, including politicians. In 1987, the Enquirer published a photograph of Senator Gary Hart with his mistress Donna Rice, in front of a boat called the Monkey Business, which doomed Hart’s Presidential candidacy. Two decades later, the magazine broke the news that John Edwards had fathered a child out of wedlock during his Presidential race. When Donald Trump decided to run for President, some people at the Enquirer assumed that the magazine would apply the same scrutiny to the candidate’s colorful personal history. “We used to go after newsmakers no matter what side they were on,” a former Enquirer staffer told me. “And Trump is a guy who is running for President with a closet full of baggage. He’s the ultimate target-rich environment. The Enquirer had a golden opportunity, and they completely looked the other way.”

Throughout the 2016 Presidential race, the Enquirer embraced Trump with sycophantic fervor. The magazine made its first political endorsement ever, of Trump, last spring. Cover headlines promised, “donald trump’s revenge on hillary & her puppets” and “top secret plan inside: how trump will win debate!” The publication trashed Trump’s rivals, running a dubious cover story on Ted Cruz that described him as a philanderer and another highly questionable piece that linked Cruz’s father to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It was even tougher on Hillary Clinton, regularly printing such headlines as “ ‘sociopath’ hillary clinton’s secret psych files exposed!” A 2015 piece began, “Failing health and a deadly thirst for power are driving Hillary Clinton to an early grave, The National Enquirer has learned in a bombshell investigation. The desperate and deteriorating 67-year-old won’t make it to the White House—because she’ll be dead in six months.” On election eve, the Enquirer offered a special nine-page investigation under the headline “hillary: corrupt! racist! criminal!” This blatantly skewed coverage continued after Trump took office. Post-election cover stories included “trump takes charge! success in just 36 days!” and “proof obama wiretapped trump! lies, leaks & illegal bugging.”

Pecker and Trump have been friends for decades—their professional and personal lives have intersected in myriad ways—and Pecker acknowledges that his tabloids’ coverage of Trump has a personal dimension. All Presidents seek to influence the media, but Trump enjoys unusual advantages in this regard. He is also in close contact with Rupert Murdoch, whose empire includes Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. (While the Times and the Washington Post have produced repeated scoops about Trump and Russia, the Journal, which employs a large investigative staff, has largely been silent on the issue.) Unlike Murdoch, Pecker heads a fading and vaguely comic archetype of Americana; sales of the Enquirer are down ninety per cent from their peak in 1970. But the impact of the tabloids, particularly their covers, remains substantial. A.M.I. claims that a hundred million people see the Enquirer in more than two hundred thousand checkout lines around the country every week. And the Enquirer’s covers invariably include statements about celebrities that are deeply misleading, if libel-law-compliant, as well as claims about politicians that are outright lies.

Pecker is now considering expanding his business: he may bid to take over the financially strapped magazines of Time, Inc., which include Time, People, and Fortune. Based on his stewardship of his own publications, Pecker would almost certainly direct those magazines, and the journalists who work for them, to advance the interests of the President and to damage those of his opponents—which makes the story of the Enquirer and its chief executive a little more important and a little less funny.

I asked Pecker about Trump during our first lunch, at one of the posh Upper East Side restaurants that Pecker frequents. His fondness for long, wine-filled lunches is only one of the ways in which he resembles the media moguls of a bygone age. At a hale sixty-five, Pecker looks as though he could be heading out for a night at the disco. He sports the same kind of bushy mustache as the seventies porn star and period icon Harry Reems. Pecker combs his luxuriant hair straight back over the collars of his monogrammed shirts. He collects sports cars and high-end wristwatches. Still, he feels that the key to the success of the Enquirer is his engagement with his down-market readers.

Pecker said that the Enquirer’s support of Trump is a straightforward response to its audience. Since January, 2016, Enquirer issues with Trump as the main image have sold between two and fifteen per cent more than the weekly average for non-Trump covers. “They voted for Trump,” Pecker told me, speaking of his readers. “And ninety-six per cent want him reëlected today. That’s the correlation. These are white working people, who love to see takedowns of celebrities, and they want to see—which is unusual, who would think these people would love a billionaire?—the billionaire’s pulpit. They know him from fourteen seasons on ‘The Apprentice’ as the boss, and they loved it when he fired those people and ridiculed them.” Pecker conveyed this admiration to Trump directly: “I’d tell him every time I’d see him. I’d say, ‘Who cares about governor or mayor, you should be President. They love you. These people love you.’ ”

Pecker is eager to use his media empire to help his friends, especially Trump, and unabashedly boasts about doing so. Earlier this year, he bought US Weekly, the glossy celebrity magazine, from Wenner Media. (Last week, A.M.I. also bought Men’s Journal from Wenner.) He negotiated the sale primarily with twenty-six-year-old Gus Wenner, the heir apparent of the company, which was co-founded by his father, Jann. “After my first lunch with David, I called up my brother and said, ‘This guy belongs in the Smithsonian,’ ” Gus Wenner told me. “He is the type of character you just don’t come across anymore. The way he operates, the way he does business—it’s completely honorable, but it feels of another era.” The lunch took place at Le Bernardin, one of New York’s temples of haute cuisine, where Pecker is a favorite customer. “When I get there, he’s drinking champagne, and our deal isn’t even done yet,” Wenner said. “And then Éric Ripert, the chef, comes to our table, and he tells us he is working on a TV project. David says to him, ‘We should talk. I could get you some ink.’ It was all very transactional.”

Wenner was curious to hear about Pecker’s relationship with the President. “I thought I would have to pull it out of him smoothly,” he said. “But he offered it up pretty readily, and I was all ears. He was painting Donald as extremely loyal to him, and he had no issue being loyal in return. He told me very bluntly that he had killed all sorts of stories for Trump. He hired a girl to be a columnist when she threatened to go public with a story about Donald.”

Pecker denies telling Wenner that he killed stories for Trump or that he hired a columnist in order to suppress a story about Trump. Nevertheless, last year the Wall Street Journalreported that Pecker paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to a woman named Karen McDougal, who had alleged that she had a months-long romantic relationship with Trump, beginning in 2006, during his marriage to Melania.

When I asked Pecker about McDougal, who was Playboy’s Playmate of the Year in 1998, he told me that he first met her when she modelled for the cover of Men’s Fitness, another A.M.I. magazine. “When her people contacted me that she had a story on Trump, everybody was contacting her,” he said. “At the same time, she was launching her own beauty-and-fragrance line, and I said that I’d be very interested in having her in one of my magazines, now that she’s so famous.” But Pecker had a condition for hiring her: “Once she’s part of the company, then on the outside she can’t be bashing Trump and American Media.”

I pointed out that bashing Trump was not the same as bashing American Media.

“To me it is,” Pecker replied. “The guy’s a personal friend of mine.”

I e-mailed McDougal, who declined to discuss the matter, writing, “I don’t really like to talk about things other than my interests and passions—and that’s health, wellness, etc, etc!!”

There are still traces of David Pecker’s Bronx boyhood in his accent and his attitude. He grew up on a Jewish block in a mostly Italian neighborhood until the family moved to New Rochelle, in Westchester County. His parents were older and unwell. His father, a bricklayer, died in 1967, when David was sixteen, and David needed to work to support his mother. He started bookkeeping for local businesses, including some of the rougher-edged outfits from his old neighborhood in the Bronx. By the end of his college days, at Pace University, he was making about two thousand dollars a month, a substantial sum in the late nineteen-sixties. One of his clients was an excavating contractor who couldn’t get a license to buy explosives, because he had a criminal record. “I was the one who was able to get the license, and I received the Dynomax in the Bronx,” Pecker told me.

After passing the C.P.A. exam, Pecker went to work as an accountant for CBS, which during the seventies had a magazine division that included Car & Driver, Road & Track, Field & Stream, and Modern Bride. He moved up the ranks at CBS but chafed against the bureaucratic culture. “You could not go to the bathroom there without getting permission from somebody first,” he told me. “You couldn’t give your secretary a dollar raise, you couldn’t do anything.”

In 1987, Pecker made a deal with an entrepreneur named Peter Diamandis to buy out CBS’s magazines, some of which they sold to Hachette, a French conglomerate that owned such magazines as Paris Match and Elle, and also manufactured fighter planes. At Hachette, Pecker set out to learn about the sales, marketing, and manufacturing sides of the magazine business. Notably, he never worked as a journalist, an omission that has led him to disdain certain conventions.

In 1990, Pecker was named the president of Hachette, which later bought Premiere, a movie magazine, with the financier Ronald Perelman. In 1996, after Perelman questioned a Premiere investigation about financial problems at Planet Hollywood, a company to which Perelman had business ties, Pecker killed the story. “The last time I looked, I am the C.E.O. of this company,” Pecker told a reporter. When I asked him about the contretemps, Pecker explained it as a financial decision. “I called the editor up and I said, ‘Why are we doing an investigative piece on Planet Hollywood, when this is supposed to be a film magazine?’ ” He told the editor that he had spent two hundred thousand dollars on a research study showing that every time the magazine did an investigative piece sales went down. “I said, ‘I don’t really feel that this is appropriate.’ So he calls a news conference, resigns, and the whole staff is upset.” The actor Kevin Costner even joined in the protest, refusing to appear on the cover of the magazine. Pecker said that he told Costner, “It’s a coveted thing to be on the cover of Premiere magazine. John Travolta took it in a second.”

Pecker quickly earned a reputation for producing magazines more cheaply than his competitors could. He also invested in new projects, including George, a political magazine founded, in 1995, by John F. Kennedy, Jr. “Hachette seemed like a different kind of place than some of the other publishing companies,” Michael Berman, Kennedy’s partner on George and now the head of the investment firm Galaxy Partners, told me. “It was a little grittier than most, a little more bottom-line-oriented at the time. Not a lot of bells and whistles. Since we were going to be owners as well as implementing it, we liked that there was attention to the bottom line.” George got off to a fast start but ultimately foundered after Kennedy’s death, in a plane crash, in 1999.

Pecker has no strong political views, but he has a fascination with, and a reverence for, celebrity. Recalling his first meeting with Kennedy, Pecker told me, “It was February, he comes up on his bike, he’s outside, he has his hat over his head, he comes inside, he takes off his coat, he has a beautiful Armani suit on, and he pulled his cap off and it was like he never even had to comb his hair! I don’t understand it. I mean, every hair was perfect. Every hair was perfect!” Pecker met Trump around the time he launched George, and his relationship with the developer resembled his connection to Kennedy. Talking about an early visit to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, where he was pitching advertisers on George, Pecker described Trump’s then wife, Marla Maples: “I have never in my entire life seen a more beautiful woman in a bodysuit than Marla Maples. I mean, seriously, out of ten she was a fifteen.” For Pecker, Trump represented an aspirational figure in every dimension of life: in his glamour, his wealth, his access to beautiful women, and his style of living.

Pecker created a custom-publishing division at Hachette, producing magazines for clients who would dictate the content and then distribute them to customers. The first, Sony Style, was made for the electronics company. Pecker’s next idea was for a magazine about Donald Trump. Pecker had a home in Palm Beach, not far from Mar-a-Lago, and a neighbor there introduced him to Trump, who agreed to the project. The result was a magazine called Trump Style, which today looks like a glossy preview of the coverage Pecker later gave Trump in his tabloids. Representative samples include “Trump Tower, with its bronze façade and swaths of rose marble, combines New York City’s most glittering destination with shops both popular and posh”; “40 and Fabulous: Donald Trump’s latest real estate venture, a landmark office building at 40 Wall Street, could not be in a better location”; “A weekend at Trump Taj Mahal can’t help but be an exhilarating exercise in glamour and fun.” The magazine came out for five years and was, according to Pecker, “very successful.”

In the late nineties, just before the dot-com boom, money managers still regarded print magazines as a market for growth. In early 1999, the private-equity firm Evercore went looking for media opportunities and came upon American Media, Inc. Evercore recruited Pecker both as an investor and as the chief executive of the company, and closed a seven-hundred-and-sixty-seven-million-dollar deal for A.M.I. in March of that year. A.M.I. owned a number of magazines, but its core asset was the Enquirer.

The Enquirer has unapologetically paid for interviews and photographs since the days of its founder, Generoso Pope, Jr. Pope’s immigrant father published the highly successful Italian-American newspaper Il Progresso, and Pope grew up in luxury. He was driven to school at Horace Mann in a limousine each morning, often accompanied by his friend and classmate Roy Cohn. (Cohn later became an aide to Joseph McCarthy and a mentor to Donald Trump; he represented Trump in the 1973 Justice Department case that accused his company of violating the Fair Housing Act.) According to “The Godfather of Tabloid,” by Jack Vitek, Pope breezed through M.I.T. and did a brief stint in the C.I.A., then in its infancy, before returning, in 1952, to New York, where he struck out on his own, buying a moribund Hearst weekly and rechristening it the National Enquirer.

Pope was a dour and mysterious character, who exerted almost total control over the Enquirer for thirty-six years. The early days, during which he attempted to brand the Enquirer as a serious, upscale weekly, were rocky. As Pope later told the tale, he had an epiphany one day when he found himself gazing at a particularly gruesome traffic accident, and noticed how many other people had also stopped to stare. “It suddenly hit me,” Pope recalled. “That’s what people want to see. That’s what I’ll give them, blood and gore.”

In the fifties and sixties, the formula was a resounding success. With headlines like “mom boiled her baby and ate her” and photographs of purported freaks of nature, such as two-headed babies, circulation soared to more than a million. The Enquirer developed a specialty in photographs of newly dead celebrities, and the paper scored a famous scoop with a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald on the autopsy table. (Dylan Howard found an original of that cover on eBay and displays it in his office.)

In the late sixties, Pope moved his operations to Florida, where he had another insight that transformed the magazine. At that point, the Enquirer was sold only through traditional venders, such as newsstands, but Pope pioneered the practice of putting magazines in supermarket checkout lines. This required him to scale back the gore (which was unacceptable to the markets) and amp up the celebrity coverage. The transformation proved a boon to business. So did a television campaign featuring the catchphrase “Enquiring minds want to know.” A cover photograph, in 1977, of Elvis Presley in his casket sold 6.7 million copies, an all-time record. (According to a former editor, the Enquirer had paid Elvis’s cousin Billy Mann eighteen thousand dollars for the image. In the past, the tabloid has paid anywhere from a few hundred dollars to six figures for scoops.) After Pope started printing the Enquirer in color, he used his old black-and-white presses to produce the Weekly World News, a compendium of true lunacy, often featuring space aliens, which was also a financial success, with as many as a million readers.

Pope died in 1988, when the Enquirer’s circulation was about four million, and the company fell into limbo. The Enquirer tabloids were eventually sold to Evercore, as a part of the A.M.I. deal, in 1999, and David Pecker became the C.E.O. Meanwhile, competitors were eating into the Enquirer’s circulation. Rupert Murdoch had started the Star, and a Canadian publisher named Mike Rosenbloom had launched a series of look-alike tabloids called the Globe, the Examiner, and the Sun. Pecker quickly took steps to crush the competition. He bought the Star and Rosenbloom’s magazines, and closed the Weekly World News. He also relocated the operation to Rosenbloom’s old headquarters, in Boca Raton. Kevin Hyson, Pecker’s longtime deputy at A.M.I., told me, “He renovated the entire building, spent five or six million dollars, and the building was beautiful, and it came out great, and it was virtually all done. The cafeteria was just about to open, when we were attacked.”

In late September, 2001, Bob Stevens, a sixty-three-year-old photo editor at the Sun, fell ill. On October 2nd, he checked into a local hospital and was later given a diagnosis of inhalation anthrax. On Stevens’s desk, in the A.M.I. building, investigators discovered an envelope containing powdered anthrax and addressed to the “photo editor” of the Sun. Stevens died on October 5th, becoming the first anthrax fatality in the United States since 1976. In short order, the Centers for Disease Control closed the Enquirer building, and most of the employees never set foot inside it again. The structure was so contaminated that all of its contents were destroyed in 2003; the Enquirer’s archive, including photographs, back issues, and notes, was lost in the process.

Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Karen McDougal, a Playboy Playmate, claimed to have had an affair with Trump during his marriage to Melania. Pecker hired McDougal as a columnist and paid her a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the rights to the story, which he never published. “The guy’s a personal friend of mine,” Pecker said.

Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker

During the outbreak, Pecker offered to bring in a team of doctors to dispense Cipro, an antibiotic, to hundreds of employees at his own expense. (Only one other employee was exposed to anthrax, and he survived.) Pecker also located alternative offices. “He protected his people,” Hyson said. “And we never missed an issue.” As a former Enquirer staffer, who was generally critical of Pecker, told me, “This was his finest hour.” (No arrests were ever made in the 2001 anthrax attacks, which ultimately killed four people in addition to Stevens. Bruce Ivins, a government scientist who was a leading suspect, committed suicide in 2008.)

By the time of the anthrax attack, the market for tabloids was shrinking. Competition from the Internet, the decline of print, and the growth of gossip shows on cable television had combined to cut into circulation numbers. Still, there was a core market for Pecker’s products, and he raised prices for his remaining customers. The Enquirer cost a dollar and forty-nine cents when Pecker bought it; the current price is four dollars and ninety-nine cents. He also targeted his tabloids to specific age groups. OK! and US Weekly, the newest A.M.I. magazine, have the youngest and most affluent readers, most of whom are in their late thirties and forties and gravitate toward Hollywood gossip. The Enquirer appeals to people in their fifties, who like investigations. The Globe is pitched to buyers in their sixties, who are fascinated by the British Royal Family and loathe Hillary Clinton. According to Pecker, “They love to read the worst possible, horrible things you could read about Hillary.” (A recent Globe headline asserted, “hillary: the real russian spy! . . . new treason indictment!”) The oldest audience buys the Examiner, whose readers, remarkably, average eighty years old. “They have the lowest income,” Dylan Howard told me. “We do a lot of giveaways for them, and stories about ‘The Golden Girls.’ ” As Pecker said to me, “The people that pay those five dollars, we get a spike the week that they get their Social Security checks. And then they pay us down from there, and then it spikes again. So they actually budget for it.”

Pecker and I had lunch in May, just after Tiger Woods was arrested for driving under the influence, and the occasion evoked some wistfulness about the difficulty of publishing a weekly magazine in a world that operates at the pace of the Internet. “That jail photo—we would have had that first,” Pecker told me, referring to Woods’s mug shot. “We would have shown the ‘before’ and ‘after’ on the cover of the Enquirer.” Instead, Woods’s booking photo hit the Internet well before the tabloid could run it in the magazine.

Pecker’s relationship with Woods suggests how he’s leveraged his brands even in a declining market. In 2007, the magazine’s tip line received a call claiming that Woods was having trysts with a waitress named Mindy Lawton, who worked at a diner near his home in Orlando. The tipster was Lawton’s mother. As Pecker recalled, “She said her daughter serves him, and then she has a relationship with Tiger, and she goes out to the parking lot behind there and they have sex together.”

After talking to Lawton’s mother, Enquirer reporters staked out the parking lot by the diner, and they saw Woods and Lawton together. “What happened was, Tiger gets into the S.U.V., she came out of the restaurant,” Pecker told me. “The Enquirer guys were behind the bushes and she must have had her period, so she threw the tampon and they grabbed it.” After the obligatory comment call to Woods, Pecker received a phone call from Mark Steinberg, Woods’s agent.

Men’s Fitness had asked Woods to appear on its cover several times, but he had always declined. A negotiation ensued, whereby Woods would pose for the magazine’s cover in return for a cancelled story in the Enquirer about the diner tryst. Neal Boulton, the editor of Men’s Fitness at the time, recalled, “Pecker was all over me about the negotiations with Tiger’s people.” Boulton quit before the Woods cover was published. “I allowed myself to get sucked into this situation,” he told me. “I just felt pretty lousy about it all.” (Lawton, Steinberg, and Woods declined to comment; Lawton’s mother could not be reached for comment.)

Pecker didn’t see the negotiation as blackmail. “I was never going to run any of it, because I’d be thrown out of Walmart tomorrow,” he said, referring to the parking-lot encounter’s unsavory details. Twenty-three per cent of the Enquirer’s sales come from Walmart, and the next biggest outlet is the Kroger supermarket chain, at ten per cent; chain stores account for roughly three-quarters of total sales. There are no formal rules for the level of explicitness or vulgarity that the chains will tolerate, but Pecker is careful not to push the limits. In the end, he scored dual victories with Woods: the golfer posed for the cover of Men’s Fitness, and later the affair appeared in the skybox of the Enquirer. Woods’s marriage and career dissolved not long afterward.

Steinberg’s attempt to negotiate with the Enquirer was unusual. For celebrities in the tabloid’s gaze, there are often only two options. Marty Singer, a Beverly Hills attorney who represents many subjects of Enquirer stories, told me that the publication will back down in the face of contrary evidence. “You can’t just tell them that a story is wrong,” Singer said. “But, if you present actual evidence that it’s wrong, they usually will respond appropriately.” (Libel suits against the Enquirer are rare these days, though in 2014 the magazine settled a case filed by a friend of Philip Seymour Hoffman, apologizing for a false story in connection with the actor’s death and agreeing to fund an annual playwriting award in his name. Richard Simmons, the fitness guru, recently sued the Enquirer for libel based on stories alleging that he had disappeared from public view because he was transitioning into a woman; the case is pending.)

The other approach is a fatalistic withdrawal from the Enquirer ecosystem. “If the story is just in the tabloids, we tend to ignore it,” Jon Liebman, the chief executive of Brillstein Entertainment Partners, a leading talent-management firm in Hollywood, whose clients include Brad Pitt, said. “If you engage in tabloid culture, it will never stop, because the tabloid culture feeds on the conversation. If you respond, they just turn your response into a story. But if the fire jumps the road, and a story gets into the mainstream press, then we deal with it.” Politicians almost never engage.

For Pecker, the Tiger Woods story encapsulates the grim ethos of Enquirer readers. “Do they care about Tiger Woods? No,” Pecker said. “Do they play golf? No. But do they want to read about his indiscretions? Yes. Do they want to read that someone who is that successful is now failing? Yes. These are people that live their life failing, so they want to read negative things about people who have gone up and then come down.”

After Pecker acquired A.M.I., his friendship with Trump deepened. Pecker joined Mar-a-Lago in 2003 and attended Donald’s marriage to Melania there in 2005. When Pecker gave a speech at Pace, his alma mater, Trump introduced him. The Enquirer held its ninetieth-birthday celebration at the Trump SoHo Hotel. Pecker was also invited to a lavish wedding that Trump organized for his ex-wife Ivana, in 2008. “Donald threw this unbelievable party for her at Mar-a-Lago—maybe seven or eight hundred people,” Pecker told me. (Ivana’s marriage, to Rossano Rubicondi, an Italian model and actor more than twenty years her junior, ended in less than a year.) Pecker hired Ivana to write an advice column for the Globe, but later replaced her with Debbie Reynolds. When Pecker got to know Jared Kushner, the pair bonded over their interest in the media and considered doing business together. (Jared has owned the New York Observer, which was once a weekly, since 2006.)

Trump has a great affection for venerable media institutions like the Enquirer, according to a longtime associate: “Donald came up in the seventies and eighties, and he still loves the iconic brands, and the National Enquirer was an institution in those days. It reached millions of people. Even though it’s smaller now, Donald’s mindset is that it’s an influential publication. And he reaches out to those readers when no one else will.” Trump’s personal relationship with Pecker facilitated that outreach.

A former Enquirer employee told me that Pecker would frequently fly from New York to Palm Beach and back on Trump’s private plane. “David thought Donald walked on water,” the employee said. “Donald treated David like a little puppy. Donald liked being flattered, and David thought Donald was the king. Both have similar management styles, similar attitudes, starting with absolute superiority over anybody else.” In the eighties and early nineties, Trump was something of a fixture in the Enquirer, thanks to his multiple marriages. A typical headline from 1990 read “trump’s mistress cheats on donald with tom cruise.” But, once Pecker took over, critical coverage of Trump vanished. “They have an agreement where David would not write anything that damages Donald,” a senior A.M.I. official from this period told me.

One employee said that Trump was also a frequent source for Enquirer stories. “When there was something going on in New York, David would talk with Trump about it. Trump provided David with stories directly,” the employee said. “And, if Donald didn’t want a story to run, it wouldn’t run. You can put that in stone.” Indeed, early in the 2016 campaign Pecker simply turned over the pages of the Enquirer to Trump, allowing the candidate to write columns under his own byline.

Because of Pecker’s close ties with the President, rumors have circulated that the publisher is in line for an ambassadorship. Pecker denies any interest in such a post. Dave Zinczenko, who oversaw several of Pecker’s fitness magazines, told me, “We were having lunch around the time the ambassador story first circulated. He laughed about it. He said that Germany or the U.K. would be too much work. It’s clear he doesn’t want to be an ambassador. It would take him out of the game.” (Pecker said that he would welcome an appointment to the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition, a part-time, unpaid, and honorary post.)

If anything, Pecker may further entrench himself in the media business. In 2013, just before Time, Inc., separated from its longtime parent company, Time Warner, Trump devoted a telling series of tweets to Pecker. “David Pecker would be a brilliant choice as CEO of time Magazine—nobody could bring it back like David!” Trump wrote. “@time Magazine should definitely pick David Pecker to run things over there—he’d make it exciting and win awards!” Ron Burkle, a California supermarket magnate and a friend of Pecker’s, recalled, “I know they were considering him to be C.E.O. when Time magazine spun off. He hasn’t had a decent balance sheet for as long as I’ve known him, but he figures out how to make his numbers work and keep his businesses going. But the boards of companies like Time Warner can be very political, and they weren’t going to turn the company over to the guy who runs the Enquirer.” At the time, it did seem outlandish that the steward of a supermarket-tabloid empire would wind up as the proprietor of a storied name in American journalism. But the idea of Pecker as the leader of Time, Inc., like that of Trump as the President of the United States, has gone from preposterous to more than possible.

Pecker has proved to be a canny leader in a difficult time for print publications. After the recession in 2010, the company reorganized under bankruptcy laws. Evercore sold its original equity stake in 2002, and in the past two decades A.M.I. has had various owners, with a changing cast of board members, but always with Pecker as chief executive. The current board includes David Hughes, who spent many years as a senior executive in Trump’s casino business. At A.M.I. board meetings, which are often held at Mar-a-Lago, Pecker boasts of his relentless cost-cutting at the magazines. (Dylan Howard told me that Pecker reduced editorial expenses by fifty-two per cent over four years, while producing the same number of magazines.) Pecker has a handsome salary, but not one that places him in the top ranks of media entrepreneurs. According to S.E.C. filings, A.M.I. paid Pecker $3.1 million last year. The over-all decline in the marketplace, notwithstanding, Pecker persuaded the board to put up a hundred million dollars to buy US Weekly from Wenner. The US Weekly staff, much reduced by layoffs, now works alongside the tabloid employees in the Manhattan newsroom.

Pecker remains interested in running Time, Inc., with its stable of weeklies, including Time, Sports Illustrated, and the great prize, People. For a while, the company was shopping itself to potential buyers, and though it’s not officially on the market, these sorts of auctions generally end, sooner or later, with a sale. A.M.I. faces many of the same financial challenges as Time, Inc., and an adviser to Pecker describes the prospect of a merger between them as “two drunks trying to hold each other up.” But both companies own some of the last weeklies in the country, and a merger would mean efficiencies in printing and distribution. Pecker couldn’t buy Time, Inc., on his own, however. He would need, as with Evercore and A.M.I., a deep-pocketed partner, and he’s looking to find one. “I think that there’s a huge opportunity,” Pecker said.

At a time when many print publications have disappeared, the readers and employees of Time, Inc., can expect that Pecker, with his disciplined regimen of cost-cutting, usually in the form of layoffs, would keep the company’s venerable titles alive. But Time and the other magazines would survive, as the Enquirer does, as vehicles for Pecker’s cultivation of his friend, the President. That’s what happened when Pecker bought US Weekly, which has heretofore largely been apolitical in its orientation. In one of the early issues of US Weekly under Pecker’s leadership, the magazine ran a fawning cover story about Ivanka Trump. “Balancing her personal ideals with love and loyalty to her father,” the cover said, “the president’s daughter will always fight for what she believes in.” ♦

This article appears in other versions of the July 3, 2017, issue, with the headline “Feeding the Beast.”

Yesterday I gave a talk at a Yale Law School Alumni luncheon in New York City. This is a summary of my remarks. (It is not a transcript—I spoke from notes.)

* * * * *

When you think about politics these days, it’s hard to avoid focusing on Donald Trump’s remarkable rise to power and his even more remarkable presidency. It’s even harder to avoid thinking about the scandals swirling around him day to day. It’s not that I don’t think these are important. But they are not the subject of today’s talk. In this talk, I want to look at the big picture. In this picture, Trump is merely a symptom. He is a symptom of a serious problem with our political and constitutional system.

Because Trump’s method is to provoke outrage and fluster his opponents, many people have wondered whether we are currently in some sort of constitutional crisis. We are not. Rather, we are in a period of constitutional rot.

By “constitutional rot,” I mean the decay of features of our system that keep it a healthy republic. Constitutional rot, which has been going on for some time, has produced our current dysfunctional politics.

Constitutional dysfunction isn’t the same thing as gridlock—after all, the three branches of government are currently controlled by the same party. Rather, it is a problem of representation. Over time, our political system has become less democratic and less republican. It is increasingly oligarchical.

By “democratic,” I mean responsive to popular will and popular opinion. By “republican,” I mean that representatives are devoted to the public good, and responsive to the interests of public as a whole—as opposed to a small group of powerful individuals and groups. When representatives are responsive not to the interests of the public in general but to a relatively small group of individuals and groups, we have oligarchy.

Republics are especially susceptible to constitutional rot

Republics are premised on pursuit of the common good. Representatives are given power for the sole purpose of pursuing the public good. The Framers understood that republics are fragile things. They are easily corrupted, and over time, they are likely to turn into oligarchies or autocracies.

When a government becomes oligarchical, leaders spend less and less time working for the public good. Instead, they spend more and more time enriching a small group of important backers that keep them in power. Because the general public feels abandoned by politicians, it gradually loses faith in the political system. This leads to the rise of demagogues, who flatter people with promises that they will make everything right again.

Oligarchy has resulted from the gradual breakdown of the party system that selects candidates and makes political parties responsive to the public, as well as from changes in how political campaigns are financed and changes in the structure of mass media. The problem has occurred in both parties, but it is especially pronounced in the Republican party, which styles itself as a populist party but is anything but. A small class of wealthy donors has disproportionate control over the Republican policy agenda. The influence of the donor class over that agenda is the best explanation of developments in Congress.

What are the deeper causes of constitutional rot? There are four interlocking features, which we might call the Four Horsemen of Constitutional Rot: (1) political polarization; (2) loss of trust in government; (3) increasing economic inequality; and (4) policy disasters, a term coined by Stephen Griffin to describe important failures in decision making by our representatives, like the Vietnam War, the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis.

Today, one of the most important, overarching policy failures is America’s inadequate response to globalization. The 2008 financial crisis is a special case of this larger policy failure. A democracy requires a stable, economically secure middle class to create the right incentives for government officials to pursue the public good. A globalized economy puts serious pressure on social insurance programs and on the economic stability and self-sufficiency of Americans. Political and economic elites have not navigated globalization’s changes well. They have taken pretty good care of themselves, but they have not taken care of the whole country. This inadequate response to globalization has hastened constitutional rot.

These four horsemen—polarization, loss of trust, economic inequality, and policy disaster— mutually reinforce each other. Political scientists have pointed out that rising economic inequality exacerbates polarization, which in turn helps produce policies that exacerbate inequality. Rising inequality and polarization also encourage loss of trust. Polarization and oligarchy create overconfidence and insulate decision makers from necessary criticism, which makes policy disasters more likely; policy disasters, in turn, further undermine trust in government, and so on.

In an oligarchical system, regardless of its formal legal characteristics, a relatively small number of backers effectively decide who stays in power. In such a system, politicians will have strong incentives to divert resources to the relatively small group of backers who keep them in power. Not surprisingly, the power of government and resources for government are often wasted or diverted from important public goods. Our constitutional system is still formally democratic but has become more oligarchical in practice over time. As a result, the United States has wasted a great deal of money on policy disasters, it has shaped the tax code so that most of the benefits of economic growth have gone to the wealthiest Americans, and through unwise tax and fiscal policy it has diverted a lot of money that could have been used for public services and public goods to the wealthy.

Constitutional defenses against constitutional rot

Our Constitution is designed to ward off both oligarchy and demagogues and preserve a republic. For the most part, it has been quite successful in the face of a wide variety of changes and challenges. Some of these features of our constitutional system, however, don’t work very well any more in preventing oligarchical tendencies. Separation of powers between Congress and the President is a good example. Rick Pildes and Darryl Levinson have pointed out that our system is better described as separation of parties rather than separation of powers. When the President and Congress are from the same party, there will be little oversight of the President. The Republican Congress’s almost complete disinterest in checking Trump is a particularly worrisome example of this.

Even so, the United States still has many other republican defenses. We still have an independent judiciary, regular elections, and a free press. Many other countries that have eventually succumbed to autocracy are not so fortunate. Moreover, in the United States, from the Founding forward, lawyers have played a crucial role in defending the republic: in staffing an independent judiciary; in promoting rule of law values in the bureaucracy; and in bringing cases to protect constitutional rights and check executive overreach. Once again, many other countries that have become autocratic are not as fortunate as the United States.

Propaganda and constitutional rot

One should not underestimate the value of our free press, even as comes under assault from the Trump Administration. Reporters have not been cowed into silence as they have been in other countries. If anything, Trump’s shenanigans and his successful manipulation of the press in 2016 have caused the press to think more deeply about its democratic responsibilities.

Even so, the power of the press to protect republican government has been weakened. Part of this is due to economics, and part of it is due to other factors. The American system of freedom of the press was undermined in 2016, not by censorship but by Trump’s very effective hacking of the media; he is both a master manipulator and an effective demagogue in the digital era.

The system of free press was also undermined by the production of effective propaganda both from within the United States and from outside it. These two forms of propaganda come from different sources but they reinforced each other in a perfect storm in 2016.

We now have domestic propaganda machines that have thrown their support behind Trump, and now engage in the shameless forms of propaganda which would have done Soviet-era apparatchiks proud. The only difference is that instead of propping up communism, they prop up Trump. In addition, Russia and allied groups in Eastern Europe engaged in successful propaganda campaigns during the 2016 election season, designed to enhance Trump’s chances and sow discord and confusion in the United States.

Propaganda’s effects corrode republican institutions and encourage constitutional rot. Propaganda enhances polarization; it increases distrust of political opponents, as well as those elements of government held by one’s political opponents.

Propaganda seeks to foster controversies that divide the country and enhance mutual distrust and hatred among fellow citizens. It seeks to convert politics into a particularly brutal opposition between virtuous friends and evil enemies who must be stopped at all costs and by any means necessary.

Propaganda also undermines the crucial role of deliberation and the search for truth in a democracy. Propaganda attempts to put everything in dispute, so that nothing can be established as true, and everything becomes a matter of personal opinion or partisan belief. Because everything is a matter of opinion, one can assume that anything a political opponent says can be disregarded, and that factual claims contrary to one’s own beliefs can also be disregarded. Thus, successful propaganda builds on motivated reasoning and encourages even more motivated reasoning. It undermines shared criteria of reasoning, good faith attempts at deliberation and mutual accommodation between political opponents in democracies.

Moreover, if people stop believing in the truth of what they read, they don’t have to think hard about political questions. Instead, they can simply make political decisions based on identity or affiliation with their political allies. Propaganda, in other words, undermines truth to destroy the concept of the public good and to encourage tribalism.

As a political system becomes increasingly oligarchical, it also becomes less equal, more polarized, and generates greater distrust, both of government in general and of political opponents. People not only lose trust in government, but in other people who disagree with them. Political opponents appear less as fellow citizens devoted to the common good and more like internal threats to the nation.

Another way of putting it is that in a well-functioning republic, there are friends and potential friends. Potential friends are people you currently disagree with, but might ally with in the future because both of you are devoted to the public good. In system of constitutional rot, you have something like Carl Schmitt’s model of friends and enemies. From this perspective, Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction is a corruption of politics, rather than its essential nature.

Trump as a symptom of constitutional rot

Loss of trust in the government and in political opponents eventually produces demagogues who attempt to take advantage of the situation. Demagogues don’t spring up unawares. People see them coming from miles away. But by this point people have so lost faith in government that they are willing to gamble on a demagogue. They hope that the demagogue can make things right again and restore past glories.

Trump is a demagogue. We might even say that he is straight out of central casting for demagogues: unruly, uncouth, mendacious, dishonest and cunning. His rise is a symptom of constitutional rot and constitutional dysfunction. Constitutional rot not only allowed Trump to rise to power; he also has incentives to increase and exacerbate constitutional rot to stay in power. Many of his actions as president—and his media strategy—make sense from this perspective.

Polarization helps keep Trump in power, because it binds his supporters to him. He exacerbates polarization by fomenting outrage and internal division. He also confuses and distracts people, keeping them off balance and in a state of emotional upheaval. Emotional upheaval, in turn increases fear and fear enhances mutual distrust.

Trump doesn’t care if his opponents hate him, as long as his base hates and fears his political opponents more. Because his supporters hate and fear his enemies, they are more likely to cling to him, because they are quite certain that his enemies are even worse.

Polarization also helps keeps most professional politicians in his party from abandoning him. Many Republican politicians do not trust Trump and many regard him as unqualified. But if Republican politicians turn on Trump, they will be unable to achieve anything during a period in which they control both Congress and the White House. This will infuriate the base and anger the wealthy group of donors who help keep Republicans in power. Republican politicians who oppose Trump may face primary challenges. Finally, Republican politicians can’t be sure that enough of their fellow politicians will follow them if they stick their necks out. In fact, they may provoke a civil war within the Republican Party, in which Trump’s supporters accuse them of stabbing Trump (and the party) in the back.

Many people think that the sense of upheaval that Trump has created in American politics means that he cannot keep going this way for long; and that his presidency is about to crack apart at any moment. This is a mistake. Polarization and upheaval are good for him. Crisis is his brand.

Why Trump has been a populist turncoat

If you understand the relationship between polarization and oligarchy you will understand a remarkable feature of American politics. Although Trump ran as a populist who promised to protect the working class from the depredations of globalization, as soon as he entered the White House, he reversed course. His cabinet is full of wealthy individuals, and many of his top advisors are from the very financial class that he excoriated in his campaign. Moreover, he has quickly allied himself with the most conservative elements of the Republican Party, and he has supported a health care bill that is likely to harm many working class Americans.

The Republican Party in Congress depends on its donor class to stay in power. The central goal of the Republican agenda, therefore, is to deliver benefits to the donor class, either through tax cuts, government expenditures, or deregulation.

The current health care bill passed in the House and awaiting action in the Senate is a case in point. It is actually a tax cut disguised as a health care measure. It offers a 600 billion dollar tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, which it pays for by removing some of Obamacare’s insurance protections and gradually eliminating its Medicaid expansion. The health care bill’s tax cut also sets the revenue baseline that will be used to evaluate tax reform in the next fiscal year, when the Republicans will once again use the reconciliation procedure to pass a bill that cannot be filibustered. By locking in tax cuts in the health care bill, Republicans make tax reforms easier to accomplish in ways that are more likely to please their donors.

From the standpoint of populism, the health care bill is an utter travesty; it withdraws important benefits and protections from working class Americans to benefit the very wealthiest. But it makes perfect sense from the standpoint of oligarchy. Even so-called moderate Republicans in the Senate depend heavily on the donor class, and therefore they face enormous pressures to cave and support the bill by adopting a face-saving (but ineffectual) compromise. Something similar happened in the House. Establishment and more moderate Republicans also caved, not because the Freedom Caucus is so powerful, but because the powerful donors who shape the party’s policy agenda wanted their tax cuts. Moreover, because the Senate bill is likely to be so unpopular among the general public, Senate Republicans are drafting it in secret, with no public hearings. The actual text won’t be revealed until shortly before the vote is taken. After all, as one Senate aide explained, the Republicans aren’t stupid. They know that the bill is toxic. But it pleases their donors, and so they will sacrifice any pretense of procedural regularity to achieve their goals.

The health care bill is a prime example of constitutional rot. Our nominally republican system of government has become so infected by oligarchy that the party in power has no scruples about acting in an entirely shameless manner, as long as the interests of its masters are well-served.

Which brings us back to Trump’s about face. Trump ran as a populist but he now governs as a sellout. This is not an unusual phenomenon among populist revolutionaries. Once they take power, they often quickly discard the people who put them in power; they substitute new backers who are easier to deal with and/or pay off to stay in power.

Trump is a huckster, with few actual ideological commitments. So he has few qualms about changing course. It is much easier for Trump to ally himself with Congressional Republicans than to attempt a seriously populist legislative agenda, which would be very costly, and would be opposed by members of his own party. Working across the aisle with Democrats is unlikely because of the very polarization Trump has helped foster. Democrats do not trust him and working with them might lead his Republican allies in Congress to abandon him. And he needs loyalty among Republicans to fend off the scandals swirling around him.

Thus, ironically, Trump’s very strategies for gaining power—dividing the country and fomenting mutual hatred—mean that he should align his policies with members of his own party against the Democrats. That means that he will not govern as an economic populist, although his rhetoric will remain rabidly populist. But there will be little substance behind it. It is far easier to align with Congressional Republicans, who will protect him from Democrats who despise him and want to topple him with scandals.

Having cast his lot with Congressional Republicans, that means that he too, will serve the same donor class. Trump may have run a populist campaign, but now that he is in power, he has pretty much embraced oligarchy. His populism is mostly sloganeering—it is a Potemkin village. We might say that it takes a Potemkin village to make a Trump presidency.

The future

That’s the bad news. Here is the good news.

First, Trump represents the end of a cycle of politics rather than the future of politics. American politics is divided into regimes in which one party’s agenda tends to dominate. Eventually that party runs out of steam, its coalition fragments, its political agenda becomes irrelevant and inadequate to current problems, and the evolution of the political system undermines it.

Trump is the last president in the Reagan regime. During this period, the dominant party was the Republican Party; the regime’s policy agenda was tax cuts and deregulation above all; its coalition was white voters plus professionals and wealthy business elites; and it fostered and exacerbated the polarization of political parties that began with the 1968 election.

The Reagan regime’s electoral coalition is falling apart; from 1992 to 2016, the Republican Party won the presidential popular vote only once; twice the party has had to depend on an electoral college victory. This is a sign of weakness, not strength.

The regime is crumbling; Trump is the last Reaganite. In the next few election cycles, a new regime will begin, offering the possibility of a new beginning in American politics.

Second, despite the influx of propaganda and the decline of separation of powers in restraining the President, many features of the constitutional system remain robust. We still have an independent judiciary, a free press, and regular elections.

Third, we should not confuse what’s been happening in the past several months with constitutional crisis. Constitutional crisis means that the Constitution is no longer able to keep disagreement within politics; as a result people go outside the law and/or turn to violence or insurrection. However unpleasant our politics may be, all of our current struggles are still within politics.

Fourth, we are headed for a big showdown in electoral politics over the next several election cycles. One of the two parties will have to find a way to restore trust in government and renounce oligarchical politics. The next decade will tell the tale. I remain hopeful.

Even if Trump left office tomorrow, and were replaced with Mike Pence, there would still have to be a reckoning over these issues. Indeed, even if Hillary Clinton had won the election, there would still have to be a reckoning—perhaps even more urgently if Clinton won, because she ran a campaign that paid so little attention to populist concerns. The United States has failed to reconcile globalization with democracy. It has not accommodated the demands of republican government to global economic change. This is a serious policy failure, and it has contributed to constitutional rot. The bill for this neglect is coming due. We will have to pay it.

The central question is how to preserve republican government in the face of a changing global economy. Trump is a merely symptom of the larger problem. So my advice to you is: keep your eye on the larger issue, and not on the President’s latest tweets.

I believe we will get through this, together. But we have to pay attention to the real sources of constitutional dysfunction, and preserve our republic. In this task, lawyers like the people in this room today have an important role to play in defending the Constitution and the rule of law. Thank you very much.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Constitutional Rot and Constitutional Crisis

JB

No one could accuse Donald Trump’s presidency of being boring. The first hundred days have careened wildly through scandals, revelations, outrages, and fracturing of political norms. Every time Trump does something remarkable, like the recent firing of Director James Comey, pundits ask whether we are in a constitutional crisis.

However, as I noted in a previous post, constitutional crisis refers to something different: A constitutional crisis occurs when there is a serious danger that the Constitution is about to fail at its central task of keeping disagreement within the boundaries of ordinary politics instead of breaking down into lawlessness, anarchy, violence, or civil war.

As Sandy Levinson and I have explained, there are three types of constitutional crises. In Type One crises, political leaders announce that they will no longer abide by the Constitution or laws (for example, because of emergency), or they openly flout judicial orders directed at them. In Type Two crises, people follow what they believe the Constitution requires, leading to political paralysis or disaster. In Type Three crises, political disagreement about the Constitution becomes so intense that the struggle goes beyond the bounds of ordinary politics. People take to the streets; there are riots; the military is called out to restore order (or suppress dissent); political figures threaten violence or engage in political violence; or parts of the country revolt and/or attempt to secede,

Constitutional crisis is very rare, and nothing that has yet happened in the Trump Administration — including the Comey firing– comes even close. But people are right to think that something important– and dangerous–is happening to our political institutions. That is why, I think, people so often reach for the term “constitutional crisis” to describe it.

In this essay, I want to introduce a new idea to explain our current predicament. I will distinguish constitutional crisis, which is very rare, from a different phenomenon, which I think better describes what is happening in the United States today. This is the idea of constitutional rot.

Although the Comey firing is not an example of constitutional crisis, it is an example of constitutional rot. For this reason, people are right to worry about it.

Constitutional Rot: Decay in the Norms and Institutions that Support Democracy

What is the difference between constitutional crisis and constitutional rot? Constitutional crisis could, in theory, happen to any constitution; constitutional rot is a specific malady of constitutions of representative democracies—that is, republics. Constitutional crisis occurs during relatively brief periods of time; constitutional rot is a degradation of constitutional norms that may operate over long periods of time.

What is constitutional rot? Democratic constitutions depend on more than obedience to law. They depend on well-functioning institutions that balance and check power and ambition. These include not only public institutions but institutions of civil society like the press.

Next, democracies depend on the public’s trust that government officials will exercise power in the public interest and not for their own personal benefit or for the benefit of private interests and cronies.

Democracies also depend on forbearance on the part of public officials in their assertions of power, and obedience to norms of fair political competition. These norms prevent ambitious politicians from overreaching and undermining public trust. These norms help to promote cooperation between political opponents and factions even when they disagree strongly about how to govern the country. Finally, these norms prevent politicians from privileging short term political gains over long term injuries to the health of the constitutional system.

When politicians disregard norms of fair political competition, undermine public trust, and repeatedly overreach by using constitutional hardball to rig the system in their favor, they cause the system of democratic (and republican) constitutionalism to decay. This is the phenomenon of constitutional rot.

The idea of constitutional rot is very old. The political theory of republicanism familiar to Constitution’s founders asserted that republics were delicate institutions that were always susceptible to decay and corruption over time. Time was the great enemy of republics, because ever-changing circumstances, and the driving force of people’s ambitions and desire for power would open the door to—if not encourage—multiple forms of institutional corruption. In modern democratic republics, this institutional corruption is a version of constitutional rot.

The Dangers of Constitutional Rot

Constitutional rot creates two serious risks to democratic politics. First, by playing too much hardball, demonizing their opposition, and attempting to crush those who stand in their way, political actors risk increasing and widening cycles of retribution from their opponents. This may lead to deadlock and a political system that is increasingly unable to govern effectively.

Second, undermining or destroying norms of political fair play and using hardball tactics to preempt political competition may produce a gradual descent into authoritarian or autocratic politics. Such states may preserve the empty form of representative democracy—they may have written constitutions and regular elections; and they may adhere for the most part to the rule of law formalities. But power is increasingly concentrated and unaccountable; the press, civil society, political opponents, civil servants and the judiciary no longer serve as independent checks on the power of the people in charge. Indeed, political leaders may systematically seek to weaken or co-opt each of these possible sources of opposition. These features of constitutional rot are likely to lead to increasing corruption, overreaching, and suppression of basic liberties. Regimes that slide into autocracy or authoritarianism may not suffer constitutional crises in the sense that they are politically stable and successfully avoid civil unrest or civil war. But they have failed as democratic constitutional systems; increasingly they are democracies in name only.

Obviously these two risks—deadlock and descent into autocracy—are related. A system that has become so deadlocked that politics seems futile may lead to the election of demagogues and authoritarian minded politicians who undermine democratic norms and lead a nation toward autocracy.

There are important literatures emerging on these questions in political science, including the study of hybrid regimes that split the difference between autocracy and democracy, and the phenomenon of democratic backsliding, which we have seen in places like Hungary and Turkey. This January, Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq, writing on this blog, offered an account of what they call constitutional retrogression. (This is an opening statement of a larger project they are working on, How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy.) All of these ideas are related to what I am calling constitutional rot.

Lest I be misunderstood, I am not claiming that the United States has already slid into autocracy, or that we have already produced anything like the democratic backsliding we see in Hungary or Turkey. Our institutions remain far more robust. And indeed, as the incurable optimist that I am, I believe that our democratic institutions are resilient enough to push back against the depredations of a demagogue like Trump. But what many Americans increasingly sense, I think, is that our democratic institutions are decaying and/or are under assault. If nothing is done to halt the decay, we will eventually be in very big trouble.

III. How Constitutional Rot Relates to Constitutional Crisis

What is the relationship between constitutional crisis and constitutional rot? The two phenomena are not identical. As noted above, the question of constitutional crisis concerns whether the constitutional system can perform its central function of making politics possible—keeping struggles for power within politics and preventing violence, insurrection, and civil war. The three types of constitutional crises listed above can occur in many different kinds of systems, whether democratic or not. Constitutional rot, by contrast, is a feature of constitutional democracies and republics—it concerns how these systems degrade into deadlock and despair on the one hand, or into authoritarianism and autocracy on the other.

There is another important distinction. The idea of “crisis” refers to a crucial moment in time—usually rather brief in duration—in which the constitutional system will adequately respond to a challenge, be undermined, or be successfully reconstituted. Constitutional rot, by contrast, is often a long and slow process of change and debilitation, which may be the work of many hands over many years. Crisis seems to come upon us suddenly—it focuses everyone’s attention on the spectacle. Rot develops slowly and gradually and may be imperceptible in its earliest stages; sometimes features of constitutional rot are obvious, but sometimes they operate quietly in the background.

Even so, the two phenomena are connected. Continued constitutional rot in a democratic system may be the harbinger of a constitutional crisis years later. In his 2015 book, Broken Trust: Dysfunctional Government and Constitutional Reform, Steven Griffin has argued that the most important source of constitutional dysfunction in the United States is increasing loss of public trust among citizens. This loss of trust did not occur overnight; it is the result of decades of fateful decisions by political actors seeking short-term political success, stoking political polarization to win elections, and playing political hardball to lock in greater power and reduced accountability. Griffin regards this as a sort of “slow-motion” constitutional crisis. I would say that it is a description of constitutional rot.

Constitutional rot in a democracy need not always lead to constitutional crisis. It might simply lead to a less just and less democratic system of government. This is what happens in slides to autocracy. Nevertheless, constitutional rot, if unchecked, can lead to a constitutional crisis, just as placing increasing weight on a rotten tree branch can eventually cause it to snap. Indeed, constitutional rot can lead to any one of the three types of constitutional crisis that Levinson and I described.

Politicians may publicly reject constitutional obligations. (Type One). The system may suffer severe crises of governance in which the state is unable to perform basic functions (Type Two). Finally, loss of public trust combined with the rise of political opportunists and demagogues who stoke anger and resentment in their followers (or in their opponents) may produce cycles of political violence, or even insurrection (Type Three).

Constitutional rot, in other words, can eventually cause a democratic constitution to fail both as a *democratic* constitution—because the system degenerates into autocracy; and as a democratic *constitution*— because the constitution no longer can keep political disagreement within the bounds of law and peaceful political dispute.

My view is that we are not currently in a period of constitutional crisis. But for some time we have been in a period of increasing constitutional rot. The election of a demagogue like Trump is evidence that our institutions have decayed, and judging by his presidential campaign and his first hundred days in office, Trump promises to accelerate the corruption.

Understanding the Comey Firing in Terms of Constitutional Rot

Similarly, Trump’s firing of James Comey was not in itself a constitutional crisis, because the President legally has the authority to fire the FBI Director. It happened once before, when Bill Clinton fired Director William Sessions because of ethics violations. Comey’s firing is not a constitutional crisis. Trump has not asserted (for example) that he is deliberately acting outside the Constitution.

Rather, Comey’s firing is a symptom of constitutional rot, and people have been employing the language of constitutional crisis to describe it. This problem, I think, is related to what Steven Griffin meant when he suggested that we are in a “slow motion” constitutional crisis, one ultimately caused by lack of public trust in government.

Many Americans no longer trust government to act in the public interest, and many politicians act in ways that encourage their lack of trust. President Trump has violated many preexisting political norms, and our increasingly polarized politics has caused the nation’s two political parties to push the envelope through various forms of constitutional hardball. When people in power no longer hesitate to use their power to its fullest extent, and when norms of fair political competition are pushed aside, the viability of our democratic constitutional system is threatened.

The real concern about James Comey’s firing as FBI Director is best understood in terms of constitutional rot. The FBI director serves for a 10 year term that is designed to span across presidential terms in office. The goal is to insulate the head of the nation’s investigative service from political pressure by politicians—and especially the President, who always retains the power to remove the director. Thus, the technical legal rule that the President can fire the director is accompanied by a more amorphous democratic norm; namely, the norm that the president should hesitate to remove a director except for very good reasons, and that the President should not remove a director in circumstances in which it might appear that the President is pressuring the FBI to compromise its investigative authority for political reasons.

The Comey firing violates this democratic norm. The circumstances of the firing, as well as Trump’s own shifting explanations for it, suggest that Trump acted out of corrupt motives. The concern is that Trump fired Comey because Trump sought to hinder ongoing investigations into connections between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government, or between criminal enterprises (like money laundering) involving Russian oligarchs and Trump’s businesses. Democratic norms exist to prevent even the appearance of political corruption. The worry is that the norm was violated in circumstances that scream conflict of interest and create the appearance of corrupt motivations—that Trump used his powers as President to obstruct an ongoing criminal investigation. If one could prove Trump’s intent to obstruct the FBI’s investigations, this would constitute a violation of federal obstruction of justice laws, and very likely constitute an impeachable offense to boot.

Loss of trust brought Trump to power and loss of trust keeps him in power despite his incompetence and venality. Loss of trust has exacerbated political polarization– members of each party increasingly view the other as mortal enemies. Polarization, in turn, sows increasing distrust, continuing the cycle. Because of extreme polarization, Congressional Republicans feel they can’t afford to abandon Trump, even though many of them understand that he is a demagogue and unfit to be President. If they stand up to Trump, they fear that their base will punish them, and that Democrats will take advantage of them. If they spend time investigating or blocking Trump, they also fear that their policy goals will be derailed and their donors will punish them as well. Hence Republicans keep their mouths shut and continue to enable Trump. The inability to act caused by polarization is a form of institutional rot, which creates a space for Trump to continue to violate constitutional norms.

* * * * *

Constitutional rot does not occur all at once; it is a gradual process. The constitutional system in the United States may well be able to survive even Donald Trump’s misadventures. But Trump’s demagogic rise, his conduct of the presidency, and the inability (or unwillingness) of members of Congress to stop him, are signs that all is not well in American constitutional democracy. To paraphrase Shakespeare, something is rotten in the state of America. The limbs of the great tree of state are decaying. At some point, if we put too much weight on our democratic institutions, they will snap. Then we really will be in a constitutional crisis.

The language of constitutional rot is a better way to understand people’s recurrent use of “constitutional crisis” in describing the Trump Administration. There is currently no actual constitutional crisis in the United States. But if constitutional rot continues, we are living on borrowed time.

[UPDATE: For more on the problem of constitutional rot, see my June 14th speech to the Yale Law School Alums, Trumping the Constitution.]

I don’t know how much of this is accurate, but it’s worth keeping an eye on and doing your own independent research and thinking about.

Get up to speed on the growing controversy engulfing the presidency.

Keeping track of the relentless news on the widening Trump-Russia investigation—from revelations about the president’s inner circle to the role of Russian oligarchs and other assorted players—isn’t easy. As part of our project to cover this scandal, we’ve assembled dossiers on the sprawling cast of characters who populate this stranger-than-fiction controversy threatening to engulf the presidency. We’ll be adding to and updating these, so check back regularly.

Donald Trump

Despite his claims to the contrary, the president’s ties to Russia are long, deep, and, above all, mysterious. In the 1980s, before the Soviet bloc crumbled, Trump was already trying to get a foothold behind the Iron Curtain. Since then, he has on at least three occasions announced plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow in partnership with various power players and oligarchs. Before his campaign came under investigation by the FBI and assorted congressional committees, the mogul happily touted his Russian dealings: “I’ve done a lot of business with the Russians,” he once bragged to David Letterman.

Trump’s relationship with Russia, and his refusal to condemn the Kremlin as evidence of its election interference became clear, raised questions during his campaign. Not only did Trump praise Vladimir Putin, but his campaign pushed to remove a plank from the Republican Party platform that called for arming Ukraine in its fight against Russian forces.(Blogger’s note–> this action did happen and confirms some of the allegations contained in the Steele dossier).

He also surrounded himself with aides and advisers with curious Russian connections, including lobbyist Paul Manafort and little-known consultant Carter Page, who traveled to Moscow at the height of the presidential campaign to deliver a speech critical of US foreign policy. That same month, a former British spy and Russia expert named Christopher Steele, who had been hired by a US research firm to look into Trump’s Russia ties, grew so worried by what he was finding that he provided his intelligence reports to the FBI. Mother Jones was the first outlet to report on the existence of the memos and the spy’s effort to get them into the hands of American authorities. Steele’s dossier contained a series of hair-raising—though as yet unverified—claims: Russia had been cultivating Trump for years, it possessed blackmail-worthy material on Trump of a sexual nature, and the Trump campaign may have colluded with the Kremlin as it mounted a hacking operation to tarnish Trump’s opponent.

The president has called the Russia scandal a “hoax” drummed up by the “fake news media,” and said, “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me.” But he has grown increasingly enraged by the various investigations swirling around him and his associates, denouncing them as a “witch hunt.” At one point, his White House, with the help of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, staged a clumsy effort to redirect the controversy to Obama administration surveillance. As the scandal snowballed, Trump abruptly fired James Comey, the FBI director overseeing the bureau’s investigation into ties between Trumpland and Russia. But far from disappearing, the scandal is poised to define Trump’s presidency. It could even end it.

Vladimir Putin

Despite a once-hopeful move toward democracy, Russia can’t seem to shake its Soviet legacy. A major reason is the former KGB spy and USSR functionary who has led modern Russia for most of its 26-year existence. Putin is rumored to be one of the richest men—if not the richest man—in the world. Not bad for a guy who has spent his entire career in government service. After graduating from law school in 1975, he entered the KGB and ascended rapidly, eventually becoming the head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor organization, in 1998. Putin’s rise in politics was even more rapid: In 1999, he was named deputy prime minister and then acting prime minister by President Boris Yeltsin; months later, when Yeltsin resigned, he became acting president. He has led the country ever since.

Many Russia experts believe Putin’s main goal is to restore Russia’s place in the world as a major power by challenging the dominance of Western democratic values. This goal fueled the Kremlin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, Russia’s opposition to Eastern European countries joining NATO or the European Union, and more recently a campaign by the Kremlin to undermine US and European elections with cyberattacks. Within Russia, Putin has also stoked the image of the West as an enemy, spreading fake news like his claim that Hillary Clinton instigated mass protests in Moscow in 2011 following Putin’s reelection as president.

Putin has long had an admirer in Trump. In a 2007 TV interview, Trump said Putin was “doing a great job” in “rebuilding Russia.” In his 2011 book, Time to Get Tough, Trump lauded Putin’s “grand vision” for Russia and its surrounding countries. Trump’s pronounced admiration has since been reciprocated, if only tepidly: During the 2016 campaign, Putin called Trump “a colorful and talented man” and “bright,” and he later applauded the future president for “reaching the hearts of the voters” and “representing the common people.”

The Family

Ivanka Trump

The “first daughter” is so tight with Dasha Zhukova, the wife of Russian oligarch and Putin ally Roman Abramovich, that she reportedly invited Zhukova to attend her father’s inauguration.Ivanka has also helped her father pursue business deals in the former Soviet bloc.In 2006, Donald Trump asked formerly “Mafia-­linked” businessman Felix Sater to “squire” Ivanka and her older brother, Don Jr., around Moscow, according to the Washington Post. And Ivanka was deeply involved with a failed effort to build a Trump Hotel in Azerbaijan, where the Trumps had joined forces with a family whom a government minister had accused of corruption and who had possible ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Donald Trump Jr.

“I have nothing to do with Russia,” President Trump has declared. “No deals. No loans.” That’s not quite true. Just ask his oldest son, who serves as the executive vice president of the Trump Organization. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Don Jr. told investors in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”Weeks before the election, Trump’s son was reportedly paid $50,000 to address a pro-Russian group in Paris whose leader nominated Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize in December.

Eric Trump

In a May interview with Boston radio station WBUR, golf journalist James Dodson recalled asking Trump’s second-oldest son a few years ago about who was funding his father’s courses. “We don’t rely on American banks,” he replied, according to Dodson. “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” Eric, who manages the Trump Organization with his older brother, called Dodson’s account “completely fabricated.”

Jared Kushner

The president’s son-in-law reportedly failed to disclose “dozens of contacts with foreign leaders or officials in recent months” on his application for security clearance, including meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, a Russian state-owned bank. According to the Washington Post, Kislyak reported back to Moscow following their sit-down that Kushner had proposed “setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities.” Kushner reportedly strongly advocated Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey in May—further raising questions about his role. In late May, the Post and other news outlets reported that Kushner had become a focus of the FBI’s Russia probe, with investigators digging into his contacts with Kislyak, Gorkov, and other Russians. The 36-year-old real estate scion has volunteered to be interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee and his lawyer has said Kushner “will do the same if he is contacted in connection with any other inquiry.”

Cabinet Players

Jeff Sessions

“I did not have communications with the Russians,” the former Republican senator from Alabama said during his confirmation hearings in January. That statement quickly came back to haunt the new attorney general, after the Washington Post reported that Sessions had met at least twice with Ambassador Kislyak during the presidential campaign—including the day after then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested publicly that Russia was behind the Democratic National Committee hack. Congressional investigators reportedly are looking into whether Sessions may have had additional contact with Kislyak. In March, Sessions said he was recusing himself from any investigations of Russian election meddling, but he later played a key role in firing the senior Justice Department official overseeing the probe—Comey.

Rex Tillerson

The secretary of state and former Exxon Mobil CEO, who was once deeply involved in the company’s operations in Russia, forged deep bonds with oligarchs and Kremlin officials. In 2013, Putin awarded him the Russian Order of Friendship.

Wilbur Ross

In 2014, the billionaire (and “king of bankruptcy”) led a group of investors in a takeover of the Bank of Cyprus, an ailing financial institution with deep ties to Russia. Other top investors included oligarch Viktor Vekselberg and former KGB official Vladimir Strzhalkovsky. During Ross’ confirmation process for commerce secretary, Senate Democrats asked him for more details about the bank, including any loans made to Trump or his company. The Trump White House blocked the release of that information. But this probably isn’t the last we’ve heard about the bank: US Treasury officials are probing payments routed to lobbyist (and former Trump campaign chairman) Paul Manafort through Cyprus—a hotbed of illicit Russian cash. In March, the Associated Press reported that $1 million was directed to a Manafort-linked company in 2009 via the Bank of Cyprus.

All the President’s Men

Michael Flynn

The former Defense Intelligence Agency chief memorably led Republican National Convention attendees in chants of “lock her up.” Now Flynn—ousted less than a month into his job as Trump’s national security adviser—is facing legal jeopardy of his own. According to members of the House Oversight Committee, the retired lieutenant general may have broken the law by failing to disclose payments from Russian and Turkish interests, including for a Moscow speech he gave at an event celebrating RT, the Kremlin-­backed broadcaster, where he was seated next to Putin. Barack Obama personally warned Trump about hiring Flynn, whom Obama had fired from his DIA post. In January, acting Attorney General Sally Yates urgently told the Trump administration that Flynn had lied about his contacts with Ambassador Kislyak and could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail. When that news emerged in the Post three weeks later, Trump fired Flynn and blamed the media, calling Flynn a “wonderful man” who had been treated “very unfairly.” Flynn has offered to testify if offered immunity. In May, the Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenaed records from him and his business associates.

Paul Manafort

A lobbyist out of central casting, Manafort has repped some of the world’s shadiest autocrats and dictators, once flying to Angola in the ’80s amid the country’s bloody civil war to pitch warlord Jonas Savimbi. (In hacked text messages made public in February, Manafort’s daughter Andrea allegedly said her father had “no moral or legal compass” and described her family’s wealth as “blood money.”) Brought on to the Trump campaign at the urging of his former business partner Roger Stone, Manafort helped to guide it through the Republican convention. Manafort was ousted in August, as details emerged about his work for deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally, which allegedly involved $12.7 million in secret cash payments earmarked for Manafort. Scrutiny of Manafort, who is reportedly under investigation by the FBI and the Treasury Department, has expanded to include his business dealings with Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminum magnate and Putin ally who was denied a visa to the United States because of alleged ties to organized crime.

Roger Stone

The 64-year-old, who proudly sports a tattoo of Richard Nixon across his back, has made a career of political subterfuge. He cut his teeth at 19 as a Nixon dirty trickster, once hiring a GOP operative to infiltrate George McGovern’s campaign. He later co-founded the lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone & Atwater in the early 1980s. He has advised Trump for decades, lobbying on behalf of Trump’s casino interests and serving as campaign manager of the real estate mogul’s short-lived presidential campaign in 2000. During the 2016 campaign, Stone seemed to possess uncanny knowledge of what WikiLeaks had in store for Hillary Clinton. On October 1, he tweeted, “Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.” Less than a week later, WikiLeaks began publishing the emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. Stone claimed he was in touch with WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, and that he exchanged direct messages with Guccifer 2.0—the handle for the alleged Russian hacker(s) who posted the stolen DNC emails. Reportedly under investigation by the FBI, Stone has strenuously denied any collusion with Russians and has volunteered to testify before Congress. But anything he says should be taken with a grain of salt—his mantra, after all, is: “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.”

Michael Cohen

In the dossier produced by the ex-British spy Steele, Trump’s pugnacious personal lawyer surfaced as an alleged liaison to Russian officials—a charge he strongly denies. He has long-standing business and family ties to Ukraine. In January, he hand-delivered a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia to then-national security adviser Flynn, according to the New York Times. The effort also involved Trump’s business associate Sater and Andrii V. Artemenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker.

J.D. Gordon

The former Navy officer and Pentagon spokesman, who advised the Trump campaign on national security policy, has reportedly acknowledged advocating a controversial platform change at the Republican National Convention: removing language calling for the provision of “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine to protect the country from Russian aggression. Gordon was also one of several Trump campaign aides who met with Ambassador Kislyak during the Republican convention.

Rick Gates

As Manafort’s right-hand man, Gates helped him lobby on behalf of Putin-­allied Ukrainian President Yanukovych and was involved in at least two multimillion-dollar deals with Russian oligarchs—one with Deripaska and another with Ukrainian natural-gas titan Dmitry Firtash. Like Manafort, Gates did not disclose his work as a foreign agent to the Justice Department last year, a possible violation of the law. Following the election he helped form a nonprofit promoting Trump’s agenda, but he departed after the Associated Press reported Manafort’s business dealings with Deripaska.

Michael Caputo

The veteran PR consultant ran communications for Trump’s 2016 primary campaign in New York. But before that, he spent years working in Russia, first for the US Agency for International Development and then for his own Moscow PR firm. In 2000, he was hired by Gazprom Media to burnish Putin’s image in the United States. At one point, fearing Russian organized-­crime figures were hunting him, Caputo (and his parrot, August West) took refuge on a boat in Florida.

Carter Page

“I think he is an idiot”—so said one Russian spy to another of a 2013 effort to recruit Page as an intelligence asset. (“I didn’t want to be a spy,” Page has said. “I am not a spy.”) Washington foreign policy hands scratched their heads when Trump cited the obscure energy consultant, who had once worked for Merrill Lynch in Russia, as one of his campaign advisers. And Page’s July 2016 speech in Moscow, where he sharply criticized US foreign policy toward Russia, drew notice at the FBI, kicking off the bureau’s ongoing probe into Trump associates. Page, a central figure in the Trump-Russia imbroglio, recently gave a series of bizarre interviews in which he dodged questions but also seemed to implicate himself. He acknowledged meeting with Kislyak during the GOP convention and, after first denying that he had discussed the easing of sanctions with Russian officials, hedged in an interview with George Stephanopoulos: “Something may have come up in a conversation. I have no recollection.”

Erik Prince

In January, according to the Washington Post, the founder of notorious private security contractor Blackwater—whose sister is Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos—held a secret meeting in the Seychelles with a Russian close to Putin in an effort to establish an unofficial back channel between Moscow and Trump. Prince also reportedly advised Trump aides, including Flynn, during the transition. (Prince denies both claims.)

Ezra Cohen-Watnick

The 30-year-old National Security Council official is a member of the “Flynnstones,” as the dwindling cadre of Flynn loyalists on the NSC are known. After Flynn’s firing, incoming national security adviser H.R. McMaster attempted to remove Cohen-­Watnick from his position, but top Trump advisers Kushner and Steve Bannon intervened to save his job. Cohen-Watnick—known for his hawkish views on Iran and for clashing with CIA staffers—was among a trio of White House officials involved in an effort to lend credence to the president’s baseless claim that he had been wiretapped by the Obama administration. The NSC staffer—along with White House lawyers Michael Ellis and John Eisenberg—helped provide Rep. Devin Nunes with access to classified documents that the House Intelligence Committee chairman cited as evidence, wrongly, that Trump associates had been inappropriately “unmasked” in surveillance intercepts.

Investigators and Intel

John Brennan

In August, the then-CIA director held urgent briefings with Congress’ Gang of Eight lawmakers about Russia’s efforts to get Trump elected. Before stepping down on Inauguration Day, he told Fox News that Trump lacks a “full understanding of Russian capabilities and the actions they are taking on the world.” On January 6, the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI announced that “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

James Clapper

In May, the former director of national intelligence debunked one of Trump’s favorite pieces of spin. The president loved pointing out that Clapper once said he’d seen no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. But in congressional testimony, Clapper clarified that at the time he made that statement, back in March, he was not in a position to know of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s Russia ties. And he testified that Trump’s denials and downplaying of Russian election interference had aided the Kremlin.

Sally Yates

Six days after Trump’s inauguration, the then-acting attorney general paid an urgent visit to the White House to alert the administration that Flynn had lied about his interactions with the Russian ambassador and could be vulnerable to blackmail. “To state the obvious: You don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians,” she testified in May. Instead of acting on her warning, Trump waited another three weeks to ax his national security adviser, doing so only after the Washington Post reported on Flynn’s communications with Kislyak. A longtime Justice Department official who once served as US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, Yates was abruptly fired in late January after she refused to enforce the administration’s hastily executed “Muslim ban.”

James Comey

When news of his firing flashed across a TV screen on May 9, Comey thought it was a prank. Trump had previously praised the Justice Department veteran after he briefly reopened the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s emails just before the presidential election. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump summoned Comey for a private dinner, where he asked for the FBI director’s political loyalty, the New York Times reported; Comey promised him “honesty.” The relationship went downhill from there. Comey perhaps sealed his fate when he publicly confirmed the bureau’s ongoing probe into the Trump campaign and dismissed Trump’s claims that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration. Trump recalled of his decision to fire Comey, “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.’” News soon emerged that Comey kept detailed memos of his interactions with Trump, including on the president pressuring him to quash a growing FBI investigation into Michael Flynn.

Christopher Steele

A real-life James Bond who worked undercover for MI6 in Moscow in the 1990s and later oversaw the British intelligence agency’s Russia operations, the ex-British spy was hired by a US research firm during the presidential campaign to look into Trump’s business ties in Russia. His network of sources provided him with alarming allegations, including that the Putin regime possessed compromising information on Trump and had been cultivating the real estate mogul for years. His memos also contained salacious allegations regarding Trump’s personal conduct while visiting Russia. In July 2016, Steele passed his findings on to contacts in the FBI; after the election, US intelligence officials briefed Obama and Trump about the memos. The Senate Intelligence Committee may seek to question Steele as part of its investigation into possible Russian interference in the US election.

Robert Mueller

George W. Bush tapped the ex-Marine and federal prosecutor to head the FBI just days before the 9/11 attacks. He went on to lead the bureau for 12 years, becoming the longest-­serving FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover. Like his friend James Comey, Mueller has an independent streak and no qualms about taking on the powers that be. During the Bush years, he nearly resigned over what he saw as a rogue White House effort with the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program. As special counsel in charge of an investigation that Trump has dubbed an unprecedented “witch hunt,” Mueller is likely to again butt heads with a sitting president.

Hackers and Hacks

Julian Assange

Conservatives once called for the WikiLeaks founder to be locked up. During the 2016 campaign, Trump allies, including Roger Stone and Alex Jones, hailed him as a hero for releasing hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. (Stone claimed to have “back-channel communications” with the hacktivist during the campaign.) Assange—who has taken refuge in Ecuador’s London Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations (the case was dropped in May)—has claimed the source for the hacked messages was not the Russian government. The US intelligence community begs to differ. WikiLeaks’ release of the first batch of Podesta’s emails was curiously timed: It dropped less than an hour after a video clip of Trump bragging about sexual assault went public. Thereafter, the material was released in daily batches—that is, in a manner designed to inflict maximum harm to the Clinton campaign.

Guccifer 2.0

Guccifer was the handle of a notorious Romanian hacker who was sentenced to 52 months in prison in 2016. Guccifer 2.0 is the online persona that surfaced in June 2016 to take credit for hacking the DNC. The persona has claimed to be a lone wolf from Romania, but the intelligence community and outside experts have concluded that Guccifer 2.0 (which direct-messaged with Stone) is almost certainly a front for Russian intelligence. It’s a misogynistic one at that. “I’ve never met a female hacker of the highest level,” Guccifer 2.0 wrote last year. “Girls, don’t get offended, I love you.”

DC Leaks

The mysterious website and its associated Twitter feed popped up in June 2016. Over the course of the campaign, it published the hacked emails of military and political targets, including Colin Powell, NATO commander General Philip Breedlove, and the campaign staffs of Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The people behind DC Leaks, which is no longer active, claimed to be “American hacktivists,” but the US intelligence community reported that the site was a front for Russia’s military intelligence service.

In its joint report on Moscow’s election meddling, the US intelligence community described RT, the TV network formerly known as Russia Today, as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” The report noted it “has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks”; Assange hosted a show for the network in 2012. RT also has controversial ties to Flynn, who was paid to speak at a 2015 gala for RT in Moscow and frequently appeared as an analyst on the network. Another Kremlin-supported outlet, Sputnik, spread fake news while boosting Trump and attacking Clinton. In late May, newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron confronted Putin about Russian meddling in the French elections and slammed the two news outlets as instruments of “lying propaganda.”

Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear

The shadowy groups are affiliated with different branches of the Russian security apparatus. Cozy Bear has been linked to a variety of cyberattacks against government and corporate targets throughout the world, including a 2015 spear-phishing attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC, Cozy Bear first targeted the DNC in the summer of 2015. Fancy Bear penetrated the DNC’s network in April 2016, apparently unaware Cozy Bear had gotten there first. The group’s targets have ranged from the World Anti-Doping Agency to the German parliament.

Russian Connections

Sergey Kislyak

Following the 2016 presidential election, it came to light that Kislyak—the Russian ambassador to the United States since 2008 and formerly Russia’s deputy minister of foreign affairs—held multiple private meetings and phone conversations with Trump campaign surrogates and aides, including then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, Carter Page, J.D. Gordon, and Jared Kushner. His pre-inauguration communications with Flynn—which included discussion of US sanctions targeting Russia—led to Flynn’s ouster. Kislyak told the Washington Post he was in contact with Flynn before the election, but he declined to say what they discussed. Some US intelligence officials allege that Kislyak is not just a diplomat, but a talented spy-recruiter.

Sergey Gorkov

A graduate of the FSB’s finishing school for spies, Gorkov heads Vnesheconombank, Russia’s state-owned development bank—effectively Putin’s slush fund. With its board seeded with Kremlin ministers, including Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, the bank was the majority lender for the Sochi Olympics, has helped Russia gain financial power in Ukraine, and is currently under US sanctions because of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.In December 2016, Gorkov attended a meeting with Jared Kushner brokered by Kislyak—after which Gorkov appears to have gone directly to meet with Putin.

Felix Sater

This Russian-American businessman (and onetime FBI informant) has quite the rap sheet, including prison time for stabbing a man with the stem of a margarita glass and a guilty plea in a Mafia-linked racketeering case. Though Trump claimed in a 2013 deposition that he wouldn’t know Sater if they were in the same room, the pair in fact worked together on a variety of projects, including a potential Moscow hotel. Once a managing partner of Bayrock Group, a real estate firm with offices in Trump Tower and alleged organized crime ties, Sater reportedly worked as a senior adviser to Trump in 2010, with a Trump Organization email address and business card. In January, Sater met with Trump attorney Michael Cohen and Andrii Artemenko, a pro-Putin Ukrainian lawmaker, to discuss a “peace plan” for Ukraine and Russia.

Andrii Artemenko

Currently facing an inquiry by Ukrainian prosecutors into possible treason over his collaboration with Trump associates on the Russia-friendly peace plan, the Ukrainian parliament member claims to have evidence of corruption that could oust his country’s current pro-European president. Artemenko has spent time in prison on embezzlement charges (eventually dropped) that he says were politically motivated.

Tevfik Arif

The Kazakh founder of the Bayrock real estate firm was formerly a USSR commerce official. He hired Sater, who by 2005 became Bayrock’s managing partner; subsequently, the firm entered into deals with Trump to develop various hotel and condo projects. In 2010, Bayrock’s former finance director sued the company (but not Trump) over one of those joint ventures, the Trump SoHo, calling the building “a Russian mob project” financed with mysterious cash from Kazakhstan and Russia.

At a January 2013 energy conference in New York, Podobnyy met future Trump adviser Carter Page. At the time, Podobnyy was a clandestine Russian intelligence agent working under diplomatic cover in Russia’s UN delegation. For the next five months, Page met with, emailed, and provided documents to Podobnyy about the energy business, believing that Podobnyy’s UN position would help him broker deals in Russia. All the while, Podobnyy and one of his colleagues attempted to recruit Page as an asset.In 2015, Podobnyy was busted by the FBI for being an unregistered agent of a foreign government, along with two other Russians, but avoided arrest and prosecution because of his diplomatic immunity.

Sergei Millian

The Belarusian-American president of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the USA first met Trump in 2007 at Moscow’s Millionaire Fair. Millian—whose given name is Siarhei Kukuts—says he later signed an agreement with the Trump Organization to market Trump properties to buyers in Russia and the former Soviet bloc. In June 2016, Millian shared a slew of allegations about Trump with an associate. These allegations, corroborated by other sources, according to the ex-British spy Christopher Steele, would later make it into Steele’s unverified intelligence reports on Trump’s Russia ties—where Millian is reportedly identified as source “D.”

The Oligarchs

Dmitry Rybolovlev

Known in Russia as the “fertilizer king,” this billionaire oligarch bought a Palm Beach mansion from Trump in 2008 for $95 million—more than twice what Trump paid for it in the mid-2000s. It was a surprisingly high price, given Florida’s crashing real estate market and an appraisal for much less. At least twice during the campaign, Rybolovlev’s plane was in the same location as Trump’s, fueling speculation of deeper ties.

Dmitry Firtash

For years, this Ukrainian natural-gas titan cut deals with Russia’s state-owned gas company, Gazprom. Putin’s administration sold him Russian gas at a steep discount, and Firtash resold it in Ukraine, reinvesting some of the profits into electing pro-Putin politicians, including Viktor Yanukovych. In 2008, Firtash partnered with Manafort on an $885 million deal to buy and redo a New York hotel. The deal fell apart, but a few years later Firtash and Manafort were together again—this time named in a lawsuit alleging that Firtash laundered money through a New York investment fund established with Manafort’s help to send back to Ukraine for political use. (The case was dismissed in 2015.) Since 2013, the United States has sought to extradite Firtash from Austria to face bribery charges in an unrelated case.

Oleg Deripaska

This billionaire aluminum magnate was denied entry to the United States in the mid-1990s because of suspected ties to the Russian Mafia. A few years later, Manafort helped Deripaska try to secure a visa to come to the United States. In 2006, Deripaska reportedly hired Manafort for a $10 million annual contract; Manafort reportedly pitched Deripaska on a plan to bolster Putin’s image in the United States and elsewhere. In 2014, Deripaska sued Manafort for accepting a $19 million investment and then failing to account for the funds. (The suit is pending.)

Aras Agalarov

This billionaire’s real estate company, Crocus Group, has secured multiple contracts from the Kremlin, and Agalarov personally received a medal of honor from Putin. In 2013, Agalarov partnered with Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow, where it was hosted at one of his lavish properties. The day before the pageant, Agalarov helped organize a meeting for Trump with more than a dozen of Russia’s top moguls. Agalarov claims he and Trump made a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow following the pageant, a venture that never materialized.

Emin Agalarov

Trump starred in a 2013 music video with this middling Russian pop star (the son of Aras Agalarov). It was shot on the morning of the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, where Emin performed two numbers. In a March 2017 interview, Emin described an ongoing relationship—including “messages” and a handwritten note—with the Trump family that continued after Trump’s inauguration. “Now that he ran and was elected, he does not forget his friends,” Emin said.

Viktor Vekselberg

The Ukrainian oil baron with past ties to the Kremlin is reportedly worth $12.8 billion. Through his company Renova, he holds a 5.5 percent stake in the Bank of Cyprus, where Wilbur Ross served as vice chairman of the board until his confirmation as US commerce secretary in March.

Watchdogs and Lapdogs

Sen. John McCain

After the presidential election, McCain obtained a copy of Steele’s dossier, passing it to Comey during a December meeting. “I think there’s a lot more shoes to drop from this centipede,” the six-term senator and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said this spring. While his fellow Republicans have tried to squelch probes into the scandal, McCain has pressed for a more aggressive inquiry, calling for a special congressional select committee or an independent commission. In mid-May, he said the growing scandal had reached “Watergate size and scale.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham

On the campaign trail, the South Carolina senator was a harsh critic of Trump, calling the real estate mogul a “jackass” who lacked “the temperament or judgment to be commander in chief.” Like McCain, Graham is one of few Republicans who have not sought to downplay the Russia scandal. His Senate Judiciary subcommittee has mounted an investigation into the Kremlin’s election interference that Graham has vowed is “going to find out all things Russia.”

Rep. Devin Nunes

The House Intelligence Committee chairman’s brazen attempt to provide cover for Trump’s wiretappingallegations backfired in epic fashion. After Nunes’ White House-aided effort was unmasked, he was forced to recuse himself from the Intelligence Committee’s probe of Russian election meddling. Now the California congressman, who served on Trump’s transition team, is himself under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for possibly disclosing classified information. At a private GOP fundraiser in April, Nunes echoed Trump’s ongoing claim that the purpose of the congressional investigations into Russian election interference was to justify Hillary Clinton’s loss.

Rep. Adam Schiff

The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee has been described as “Trump’s public prosecutor.” During the panel’s first hearing on the Russia matter, Schiff laid out what amounted to an indictment in his lengthy opening statement. In his previous career as a federal prosecutor, he brought charges against the first FBI agent indicted for espionage. The congressman has been calling for an independent investigation from the start and clashed repeatedly with Nunes.

Sen. Mark Warner

One of the only Democrats with any real say in how the Russia probe plays out, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee says the investigation is “the most important thing I’ve ever done.” It wasn’t until Warner threatened to boycott the hacking probe that Trump-boosting Sen. Richard Burr agreed to include possible Trump-Russia links in the investigation. Warner now says he has full “confidence” in Burr, but various reports indicate he has become frustrated with Burr’s slow pace.

Sen. Richard Burr

“There’s not a separation between me and Donald Trump,” Burr said during his reelection campaign. Burr also worked on the Trump campaign’s national security team and takes credit for instigating the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s emails. The three-term Republican and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was enlisted by the White House in February, along with Nunes, to personally call reporters to push back on stories concerning Trump associates and Russia. No surprise, Burr originally said his panel’s investigation would not involve Trump’s campaign. He has since changed his tune, but concerns remain about whether he can lead a full and fair inquiry.

The Hyperventilators

Louise Mensch

Of all the self-appointed detectives propagating their theories on Twitter, Mensch, a novelist and former Conservative member of the British Parliament, is the most bombastic and controversial. The day before the presidential election, Mensch, who’s known for making fantastical claims, reported that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had granted the FBI a warrant to surveil Americans with ties to Trump as part of its investigation. Another two months would pass before the New York Times confirmed the existence of a warrant from the court in the case of Carter Page. Since then, Mensch has made claims that Page traveled to Moscow last July to explicitly request Russia’s help in hacking the election, delivering a prerecorded tape of Trump offering to make US policy more beneficial to Putin if elected. No reputable media have reported this.

John Schindler

The former NSA analyst declared in August 2016 that, regardless of who became president, Putin had already won the election by meddling with the American political system. Oddly, Schindler wrote about this in Jared Kushner’s New York Observer, where Schindler is a regular columnist. (Kushner has since stepped down as the paper’s publisher.) In his column and Twitter feed—which Schindler liberally peppers with blindly sourced intel community gossip—he confidently suggests it’s only a matter of time before Trump’s collusion with the Kremlin is revealed. Sample tweet: “Trump knows his illegal ties to Moscow will be exposed soon. Hence his panic. He will do anything to save himself. Even provoking civil war.”

(CNN)After President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, questions immediately arose about the President’s motivations for his dismissal — and for the recent firings of two other then-President Barack Obama-appointees who were in the middle of conducting investigations linked to Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Comey’s firing was part of a “deeply troubling pattern from the Trump administration,” that appears to be linked to two other high-profile dismissals.

“They fired Sally Yates. They fired Preet Bharara. And they fired James Comey, the very man leading the investigation. This does not seem to be a coincidence,” Schumer said shortly after the announcement, calling for a special independent prosecutor into the Trump campaign’s ties to the Kremlin.

“Any person who he appoints to lead the Russian investigation will be concerned that he or she will meet the same fate as Director Comey,” he said.

CNN’s senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin was not buying the idea that Comey was sacked over the Clinton investigation, saying it was “absurd.”

Toobin branded the move a “grotesque abuse of power by the President of the United States,” comparing the sacking of Comey to President Richard Nixon’s firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal.

The FBI director saw his reputation compromised when he became embroiled in the 2016 election campaign. He was first criticized by Republicans when he announced he wouldn’t be charging then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over her emails, and then by Democrats for publicly reopening the case days before Americans went to the polls.

Why was Comey fired?

The Trump administration attributed Comey’s dismissal to his handling of the investigation into Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. In a signed letter released by the White House, Trump informed Comey that he was “hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately,” explaining that he reached the conclusion that the erstwhile director was “not able to effectively lead the bureau.”

Blogger’s note –> shortly after the initial reasons given Trump went on TV and told THE WORLD that he fired Comey b/c of this ‘Russia thing’ and that he was going to fire Comey no matter what anyone else had to say about it, pro or con.

What was he investigating?

As head of the FBI, he was overseeing the investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to the Kremlin. Democrats have ridiculed the notion that the Clinton issue is what truly prompted Comey’s dismissal, drawing parallels to Watergate-era firings and suggesting Comey was getting too close to the White House with the Russia probe.

Where is the investigation now?

At a hearing last week, Comey confirmed that the FBI’s investigation into accusations of coordination between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian officials was continuing. It’s not clear if the incoming FBI director will pick up where Comey left off.

Appointed by Obama, former Deputy Attorney General Yates had been running Trump’s Justice Department as Acting Attorney General while Trump’s nominee for the role, Sen. Jeff Sessions, awaited confirmation. She became a household name when Trump abruptly removed her from the temporary position.

Why was Yates fired?

Ostensibly for her refusal to implement the first iteration of Trump’s ban on travelers from a number of Muslim-majority countries.

“The acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, has betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said in a statement at the time, explaining the President’s actions.

What was she investigating?

As part of the probe into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump administration, then-acting Attorney General Yates met with White House counsel to inform them that then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn wasn’t telling the truth about his interactions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and, as a result, represented a blackmail risk.

“We believed that General Flynn was compromised with respect to the Russians,” Yates said in a Senate subcommittee hearing aimed at gathering details of the Russian hacking of the 2016 election on Monday in Washington.

“Logic would tell you that you don’t want the national security adviser to be in a position where the Russians have leverage over him,” she added.

Where is the investigation now?

Yates said Monday that she warned the White House earlier this year that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn could be “essentially blackmailed by the Russians.”

Preet Bharara, former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was known as one of Wall Street’s fiercest watchdogs and a widely respected prosecutor.

Why was Bharara fired?

Bharara first refused to resign along with 46 US attorneys across the country. Although it is common for incoming administrations to replace US attorneys when transitioning to power, Trump had previously assured Bharara that he’d keep his job.

Sources told CNN that Bharara had been told after a meeting with Trump in November that he could stay on, and that he felt blindsided by the request. He was fired after refusing to comply.

At the time, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren posted a series of tweets suggesting Bharara was removed in part because he “had authority over Trump Tower.”

Bharara suggested that this was indeed the case. “I wanted it to be on record that there was a deliberate decision to change (his) mind and fire me, particularly given what my office’s jurisdiction is,” he said.

And then there’s the President’s claim that he was wiretapped in Trump Tower on orders of then-President Obama, whose investigation led back to the Southern District of New York.

“Trump has undoubtedly decided that he wants his own pick rather than the choice of Senate adversary (and minority leader) Chuck Schumer in place as the top federal prosecutor in New York,” CNN legal analyst Paul Callan wrote in March.

Where is the investigation now?

Members of both parties have said they have seen no evidence to back up Trump’s allegations about Obama, and, addressing a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, Comey said that he had “no information” to support claims by the President that he was wiretapped on the orders of his predecessor.

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“Enlightened argument . . . “

Our Founders based this country on enlightened argument — you need facts to make these kinds of arguments. Because POTUS Trump doesn’t accept this it amplifies any existing antipathy w/in any given reporter.

Congressional leaders are RICH!

For 2014, the *median* net worth of Congresspersons was $456,522. What is *yours*? #1 on the list is Rep. DARRELL ISSA (CA) at $254,000,000! TOM PRICE (GA), at $7,000,000, is rated #50 on the list of Congressional millionaires.